Tom Swift

Tom Swift was created by the Stratemeyer Syndicate and published by Grosset & Dunlap under the house name Victor Appleton; most of the books were written by Howard R. Garis. Each one introduces a new invention, a rival who wants it for himself, and a trip somewhere dangerous to prove it works.

40 books · Grosset & Dunlap, 1910–1941

Tom Swift is a young inventor living with his widowed father, the inventor Barton Swift, in the small town of Shopton, New York. Each book turns on a new machine — a motorcycle, an airship, a submarine, an electric rifle, a giant cannon — and an adventure to test it, often against rivals and crooks who want the invention for themselves. Around Tom are his chum Ned Newton, the eccentric Mr. Damon (who blesses everything from his watch chain to his fountain pen), the housekeeper Mrs. Baggert, the handyman Eradicate Sampson, the giant Koku, and Mary Nestor.

The series was produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate under the house name “Victor Appleton”; most of the books were written by Howard R. Garis. Several inventions anticipated real technology — the photo telephone (1914) is a video call, and the talking pictures (1928) are television — and the TASER takes its name from Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle: its inventor, Jack Cover, made an acronym of “Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle.” The series also gave its name to the “Tom Swifty,” a pun built on an adverb (“‘I need a pencil,’ Tom said pointedly”). A later series about Tom's son, Tom Swift Jr., followed from 1954 to 1971.

A note on content: these are popular books for boys from the 1910s to the 1930s, presented here as published. They portray Black characters, and people in Africa and Latin America, through the stereotypes of their time — most visibly in the dialect written for Eradicate Sampson and in the depiction of “natives” on Tom's expeditions.