The Making of Bobby Burnit: Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man

The Story

The novel opens with Bobby Burnit being handed an inheritance that is anything but comfortable. His father’s will bluntly declares him a fool, but a fool who must be given a fair chance to make his own way. Bobby, who has been raised as an easy-living heir with no serious duties, suddenly finds himself in charge of the family store, with a trust fund arranged so that he cannot starve but must learn to work. The shock is practical as well as emotional: the carefree son who has been drifting along in “healthy amusements” now has to take up commerce. His first instinct is to turn for guidance to Agnes Elliston, whose judgment he trusts even when it cuts too close to home.

Bobby’s immediate problem is that he enters business as a beginner in a world full of experienced manipulators. He is quickly drawn into schemes by men who know more than he does, beginning with Silas Trimmer and the proposal for a Burnit-Trimmer arcade joining the Burnit and Trimmer stores through an alley. Bobby is dazzled by the scale of the plan and by the language of expansion, without yet understanding how thoroughly Trimmer means to use him. The result is a corporate arrangement in which Bobby is maneuvered into handing effective control to Trimmer. The scenes of stockholders voting and directors organizing make the point plainly: Bobby thinks he is building something grand, but in fact he is being educated by being taken advantage of.

At the same time, his personal life is tied up with the same business education. Bobby’s visits to Agnes become more confident, almost proprietary, as if his new status gives him a claim on her. But Agnes, Aunt Constance, and the other people around her keep puncturing his vanity. Even so, Agnes remains the one person who can make him face what he is doing. His father’s delayed advice, delivered in letters opened at the right humiliating moments, becomes another kind of education. The notes are harsh, but Bobby recognizes that they are also signs of love. He starts to see that his father did not merely condemn him; he prepared a course of hard lessons because he knew Bobby would not accept them in advance.

The business plot deepens when Bobby’s allies begin to widen. He becomes associated with Biff Bates, a rough, loyal former boxer whose blunt good sense contrasts with Bobby’s social polish. Biff is the sort of man who sees fraud quickly and responds physically if needed. He helps Bobby in several crises and gives him the direct, practical support that the fashionable people around him cannot. When a stock and property deal turns sour in a swamp investment, Bobby learns another lesson in misjudgment and mercy. An older man, Applerod, is left ruined by the scheme, and Bobby, despite recognizing the foolishness of the investment, chooses to pay him more than the property is worth rather than crush him completely. That is one of the moments when Bobby’s learning becomes visible: he is no longer merely clever with money; he begins to measure what money does to other people.

Bobby’s progress is not steady. He mishandles his relationship with Agnes, receives a severe note from his father about their misunderstanding, and then finds Agnes temporarily unavailable when he most wants to set matters right. He also makes enemies more than once through the way he manages power. In the Brightlight Electric affair, he has become a force strong enough to unsettle men like Frank L. Sharpe and the larger financial crowd behind him. The stock sale, the drop in quotations, and the maneuvering over control all show Bobby beginning to play the same game as the men who once used him. Yet he is not yet fully hardened. He still talks with indignation about abuse, and he still reveals an inexperience with the darker arts of business even while learning to use them.

The most dramatic turn comes when Bobby gets into the world of politics and newspapers through the Bulletin. He uses the paper as a weapon against Sam Stone and the corrupt network around him, and the struggle becomes openly civic rather than merely commercial. Bobby arranges for legislative investigation and begins to break the hold of Stone and his associates. This is not shown as clean reforming idealism; Bobby is willing to use hard methods, alliances with dubious figures like Cal Lewis, and the machinery of the press itself. He is learning that power is not moral simply because it is directed against worse men. Still, the aim is real enough: to force crooked operators out and make public institutions answerable.

By the end, the novel brings together the various strands of business, politics, and romance. Bobby’s work with the New Brightlight Electric Company succeeds, and he compels the men who have tried to beat him into defeat. The old patterns of fraud are exposed, and those who have worked against him are driven down. Yet the ending is not only about victory over enemies. It is also about Bobby’s final movement toward steadiness in love and social standing. Agnes has waited long enough to see whether he will become more than a promising fool. He has become someone who can build, fight, and finish. The closing note is comic and satisfied: the right people are paired off, the wrong men are outplayed, and Bobby’s life, once inherited as a problem, has been made into a working identity.

The People

• Bobby Burnit begins as a rich, impulsive young man with no training for responsibility and a lively habit of trusting the wrong people. He wants success, approval, and Agnes Elliston’s respect, but he must learn that business requires patience, self-command, and judgment. By the end he is harder, sharper, and more capable, though not less emotional.

• Agnes Elliston is the clearest intelligence in Bobby’s life. She wants him to become useful without losing decency, and she refuses to flatter his foolishness. She is both romantic interest and moral tutor, and she ends by waiting rather than chasing him, because she wants a man who has earned his place.

• Silas Trimmer wants control, money, and the prestige of appearing indispensable. He works through mergers, boards, and plausible language, making himself look like a senior partner while taking the advantage. He ends as one more defeated schemer, stripped of the power he once assumed he could keep.

• Biff Bates wants to stay loyal to Bobby and keep the frauds around him from doing too much damage. He is direct, physically brave, and socially unrefined, but he sees people clearly. He becomes one of Bobby’s most dependable allies and helps turn several dangerous scenes in Bobby’s favor.

• Aunt Constance and Uncle Dan Elliston want Agnes and Bobby to come through their folly without being ruined by it. They are amused, practical, and often more worldly than the younger pair. They provide social judgment, family ballast, and a kind of tolerant supervision that keeps the romance grounded.

• Sam Stone and Frank L. Sharpe want control over money, public works, and corporate advantage. They stand for the corrupt, habitual side of the novel’s business world. Bobby’s struggle with them marks his movement from naïve ownership to active contest.

In Its Own Voice

Bobby’s father sets the tone of the whole enterprise with brutal clarity:

“I am profoundly convinced that my son is a fool,”

The line is not merely insult; it is the opening condition of Bobby’s education.

Later, when Bobby begins to understand what his father meant, the family tenderness behind the sarcasm comes into view:

“No boy will believe green apples hurt him until he gets the stomach-ache.”

That small proverb turns a hard inheritance into a form of love.

And when Bobby starts to grasp the consequences of winning in business at another person’s expense, his own moral education sharpens:

“I'm afraid it needs to be in a position to make more money for other people than for myself;”

The sentence marks the moment he begins to think beyond his own gain.

What It's Really About

The novel is about making a man out of someone who has been protected from consequence for too long. Bobby’s inheritance is not treated as a blessing but as a test, and the test is designed to be humiliating. His father’s will is severe because the father believes kindness without discipline has already injured the son. That idea governs the whole book: love is shown not by rescue, but by making failure educational. The repeated letters from the father, delivered at moments of embarrassment or conflict, make that principle explicit. Bobby is not simply scolded; he is instructed by experience until he can read the meaning of the scolding.

The business plots matter because they are the training ground where character becomes visible. Mergers, stock transfers, board votes, franchises, and property deals are not background machinery; they are the exact forms through which the novel tests whether Bobby can tell showmanship from substance. Men such as Trimmer, Sharpe, Stone, and Applerod all know how to turn language into leverage. Bobby begins by being seduced by size, names, and grand plans. He must learn, painfully, that scale alone is not value and that a scheme can be both elegant in appearance and rotten in purpose.

At the same time, the book keeps asking what kind of power a good man should use once he has it. Bobby does not become virtuous by becoming passive. He gets harder. He bargains, threatens, organizes, and sometimes deliberately uses the same ruthless tools as his opponents. The novel does not pretend that business or politics are clean arenas. Instead, it asks whether a man can enter them without surrendering all decency. Bobby’s generosity to Applerod and his insistence on doing things properly at the end suggest that the answer is yes, though never easily.

The romance with Agnes is part of the same question. She is not a reward at the end of a moral puzzle; she is a standard Bobby has to grow into. She sees through him, supports him when she can, and withholds herself when he is still unformed. Her patience is not passive. It is an active judgment about what he has become. The book therefore treats love as accountability. Bobby’s worthiness in business and his worthiness in marriage are the same problem, viewed from different angles.

Why Read It Today

Readers who enjoy energetic social comedy, business intrigue, and a hero who learns by being embarrassed will find a lot to watch here. The pace is brisk, the dialogue lively, and the novel has a strong sense of movement through clubs, offices, theaters, hotel rooms, and boardrooms. It is especially appealing if you like stories where money and manners are inseparable, and where comic scenes keep sliding into real stakes.

What lingers is the way the book treats education as a series of shocks. Bobby is not refined through lectures but through exposure to fraud, failure, and the consequences of his own confidence. That gives the novel a sharp, practical feel. It also gives it an emotional center: beneath the jokes, the father’s notes and Agnes’s discipline show a world in which affection is often stern.

At the same time, the book carries its period closely. Its social assumptions, business habits, and gender expectations belong to the early twentieth century, and its humor often depends on class, type, and accent. Some readers will find that texture rich; others may find it dated. The novel is long enough to spend time inside that world, and it does not hurry the process of disillusionment. If you want a brisk moral romance with corporate maneuvering, social satire, and a hero who gradually earns both money and self-respect, it offers exactly that.