Stover at Yale

Dink Stover

Stover enters Yale hungry for recognition, thrilled by the campus swarm and already whispering to himself that he will be captain. Around him, Le Baron's easy possession of his career and Hunter's cool, measuring handshake teach him that popularity is a currency with rules he doesn't yet understand. His restless need to be liked and his instinct to test himself against the hardest men drive the book's central question: what kind of success is worth having.

Tom Regan

Regan comes from nothing and believes in nothing but independence, clean government, and hard fighters, and he tells Stover plainly that he must get absolute hold of himself before he can do anything. He won't let the University carry him, insisting he needs the hardest things to come up against, and he plans to work his way into South Middle and the Co-op rather than take the easier path. His fierce self-reliance sharpens Stover's sense of what character costs.

Dopey McNab

McNab greets Stover on the train with mock-sophisticated chatter and a chain to put on, then lounges through the house introductions with his legs in the air, declaring he's for a good time, short but a lulu. Hunter predicts he'll be heeling the Record and hiring a tutor within a month, and the joke is that everyone, including McNab, half believes it. He gives the class its comic counterweight to ambition, a reminder of how easily college can slide into pleasure.

Joe Hungerford

Hungerford moves through the class with the confidence of a man whose offers of rooms and friendship are never refused, yet he is quietly competing with Jim Hunter for Jean Story and can't tell why she holds something back. He is comfortably, satisfactorily in love, and the emotion fills a sentimental want in his nature, but her dignity and reserve unsettle him. His rivalry with Hunter and his bafflement at Jean's doubt make him a mirror for Stover's own struggles with wanting what is difficult to attain.

Sidney Brockhurst

Brockhurst states a thing in such a slap-bang way, with no compromise, that it hits like a blow, and his insistence that the society system smothers men and separates them from the class provokes real argument. Others concede he generally gets to the point even when they think he's wrong, and his challenge to bring the college back to the campus becomes a test of whether the individual or the system shapes a Yale man. He gives the novel its most articulate voice of dissent.

Tough McCarthy

McCarthy greets Stover with a war-cry and a wrestling match that threatens the furniture, then proudly shows off the loot of the combined McCarthy family dug out of a circus trunk. His father's death during the summer ends his college course and sends him into the working world, a loss Stover feels keenly on his return. McCarthy's warmth and his abrupt removal from the story measure how quickly Yale's bright, boyish world can close over a man.