The Half-Back by Ralph Henry Barbour

First published: 1899; illustrated

Type of work: Adventure tale

Themes: Sports, education, and friendship

Time of work: The late nineteenth century

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: Upstate New York

Principal Characters:

• Joel March, an innocent New England rustic who attends first Hilltown Academy and then Harwell University
• Outfield West, his friend, a wealthy dilettante
• Stephen Remsen, a Hilltown alumnus who coaches the football team and who preaches the code of sportsmanship
• Wesley Blair, the even-tempered captain of Hilltown’s football team
• Bartlett Cloud, a rich, spoiled, cowardly scamp
• Wallace Clausen, Cloud’s chief crony, who ultimately falls under March’s more benign influence

The Story

This novel of school, football, and golf, dedicated to “every American boy who loves honest, manly sport,” traces the academic and athletic career of a seventeen-year-old farm boy through two school years, one at the well-respected, classically oriented Hilltown Academy, on the banks of the Hudson River in New York State, and the other on the ivy-covered campus of Harwell University.

When rustic-looking junior-classman Joel March, wearing an unfashionable summer straw hat late in autumn, tries out for the football eleven at Hilltown, he is verbally ridiculed as “Country” by Bartlett Cloud and his sullen crony Wallace Clausen. When March subsequently kicks the pigskin so well that Captain Wesley Blair compliments his effort, the sarcastic laughter of Cloud and Clausen is quickly silenced. Golfer Outfield West, who has observed March’s excellent performance, vows to make the acquaintance of this obviously talented athlete and teach him how to hit a golf ball.

A short time later March saves young West after a nasty tumble he had taken while pursuing one of his errant shots. The two become companions despite the difference in social status—West is from a wealthy family, while March’s parents barely exceed poverty—and despite the fact that March is a studious “grind” while West is a relaxed, procrastinating scholar. March’s healthful influence, however, soon turns West to the appreciation of the value of books and academic application.

Under the guiding hand of Coach Stephen Remsen, March prospers as a football player, and around the campus his likable personality continues to win for him many friends. Unfortunately, though, a serious student “prank” is wrongly blamed on him: The rope on the chapel bell is cut, so that the sexton is injured when he tries to ring for morning prayer. One of March’s personal letters is discovered in the tower, the “scene of the crime.” He swears his innocence, yet he cannot explain the presence of the letter. The faculty must discipline him: no athletic activity. March accepts this wrongful punishment quietly and without bitterness.

While March and West are walking near the river one afternoon a week after the suspension, they observe a rowboat in trouble. It is sinking, and two figures begin struggling to escape. March and West plunge into the Hudson to give assistance, but West, a nonswimmer, turns back to shore to summon help, at the time noting that one of the beleagured people is Cloud, who ruthlessly abandons his drowning comrade and swims away to safety. In a heralded dramatic rescue, March saves Clausen’s life. The farm boy becomes a local hero. Cloud is hissed at and snubbed for his cowardice, while Clausen, deeply indebted to March, begins a slow process of reform.

The day for the big game with St. Eustace arrives. Prospects for Hilltown are bleak, not only because Joel cannot play but also because Captain Blair has failed in Greek and is therefore also ineligible. The game turns out to be a fierce contest, a physically exhausting struggle. With time running out and Hilltown trailing, however, Clausen suddenly rushes from the field and sprints frantically onto the campus, where he confesses to Principal Wheeler that it was he and Cloud who had cut the chapel rope. March, immediately reinstated, dashes onto the field to kick a goal that gives Hilltown a tie and a moral victory. The vindicated March soon follows this athletic accomplishment with an academic one: He is awarded a fifty-dollar scholarship for his senior year.

March’s final year at Hilltown is summarized very quickly in the story: He excels in debate, leads the football team to a victory over St. Eustace, and wins a major scholarship to Harwell University. West accompanies his friend there, and while both continue to perform well as students, the most important activities described are those focusing on preparation for the annual football game with archrival Yates College. March, though only a freshman, is substitute left halfback for the varsity. He has played so aggressively and vigorously that he has broken a finger.

The day arrives for the exciting journey to Yates. The band is playing, students are cheering, pulses are throbbing—all in the spirit of friendly competition. Emotions are explosive as the game progresses. Exhilaration, fatigue, pain, power—all be-come fused in a mighty, relentless confluence of flying wedges and violent collisions. March’s damaged finger causes every play to be for him an agonizing, courageous struggle. The even game lurches back and forth, neither of the brave adversaries holding a true advantage, though Harwell appears to be weakening. With one minute to play, however, March breaks loose on a desperate, dizzying touchdown run to win the day for his team. As the band thunders its victory anthem, March is carried off the field; he is student, halfback, hero. Cloud, his erstwhile enemy, reaches up to shake his hand.

Context

The Half-Back has remained the most popular of the more than 140 books for juveniles and young adults written by Ralph Henry Barbour during a career that earned for him the designation of “dean of sport story writers for boys.” Written at a time when American youngsters were instructed through the McGuffey Readers, the adventures of the Rover Boys, the superhuman athletic prowess of dime-novel hero Frank Merriwell, and the rags-to-riches preachments of Horatio Alger fictions, The Half-Back brought a new and more attractive dimension to the tale of campus and sport. The Barbour story took uninitiated readers into the foreign atmosphere of the exclusive prep school, the Ivy League college, the athletic locker room. The reader was reserved a seat at the “training table” and at the coach’s strategy session, where secret and trick plays were diagrammed and explained and team problems were privately resolved. At a time when only a small segment of Americans had ever attended high school and when only a minuscule number of those eventually became “college men,” the “inside” story of school and sport delivered by Barbour was a revelation.

Alongside explanations of signals, tips on athletic training, and pictures of locker-room camaraderie, Barbour vividly depicted in The Half-Back the exciting panorama of furling banners on game day, institutional loyalties, sportsmanlike rivalries, energetic marching bands, school yells—phenomena unknown to most youths of the era. Few young readers had really aspired to be part of such breathtaking scenes until Barbour’s narrative made such a dream seem an accessible ambition.

Time and again Barbour would reconstruct with minor variation the all-American youth whose dreams of scholarship and athletic prowess are finally realized through application, principle, and character. In novels such as For the Honor of the School (1900), Behind the Line (1902), Weatherby’s Innings (1903), and The Crimson Sweater (1906), he would continue to portray prep school and college life, to emphasize those durable values that he had set down in The Half-Back, his first and most successful tale.