Ethelred Preston: Or the Adventures of a Newcomer

Fr. Fin’s engaging book entertains readers with a new student, Ethelred, who livens things up at Henryton Boarding Academy. The adventures intertwine a host of Catholic topics and present an entertaining and inspiring vision of childhood. Father Francis Finn, SJ, was an early 20th-century Jesuit priest who wrote delightful children’s stories about life in Jesuit boarding schools. Taken from his years of experience teaching Catholic boys, Father Finn writes about various human personalities with warmth and humor that makes for enjoyable reading for the whole family.

Father Francis J. Finn was born to Irish immigrant parents at St. Louis, Missouri in 1859. He loved to read Charles Dickens works as a boy, including The Pickwick Papers, and eventually became a priest thanks to the influence of Father Charles Coppens. After graduating from St. Louis University, he became a Jesuit and was ordained a priest in 1893. He had already begun writing his debut novel Tom Playfair prior to this, as he was assigned to St. Mary s College in Kansas and dealt with unruly boys on a daily basis. He went on to write twenty-seven other books, and his novels for children were very successful. He was much loved by young people, and thousands of them gathered to honor his death in 1928.
Francis Finn also wrote That Football Game, Claude Lightfoot, Ethelred Preston, Lucky Bob, His Luckiest Year, Facing Danger, and Cupid of Champion.