Francis J. Finn (21/24) Claude Lightfoot: Or How The Problem Was Solved
Channel: Books: Volume Two
Date: 25/03/2024

CLAUDE LIGHTFOOT, OR, HOW THE PROBLEM WAS SOLVED.....
Most of the boys in the Catholic school called Milwaukee College are engrossed with baseball and keeping up with their studies. When twelve year old Claude Lightfoot is transferred into the school, he has a rocky time of it. While Claude excels in baseball and other playground activities, he also has a knack of annoying the other boys, particularly one who is a mean bully. And though Claude is mentally bright, his hyperactive classroom behavior is a trial to his teacher. The problem that must be solved is whether Claude can settle down to become a responsible young man capable of self control. Along the way he must cope with a series of trials and obstacles, especially as he tries to achieve his great goal: to be worthy to make his first Holy Communion. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY..... 
Francis J. Finn (October 4, 1859 – November 2, 1928) was an American Jesuit priest who wrote a series of twenty seven popular novels for young people. The books contain fun stories, likeable characters and themes that remain current in today's world. Each story conveys an important moral precept. The son of Irish immigrant parents, Francis J. Finn was born on October 4, 1859, in St. Louis, Missouri; there he grew up, attending parochial schools. As a boy, Francis was deeply impressed with Cardinal Wiseman’s famous novel of the early Christian martyrs, Fabiola. Eleven year old Francis was a voracious reader, he read the works of Charles Dickens, devouring Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers. From his First Communion at age twelve, Francis began to desire to become a Jesuit priest. Fr. Charles Coppens urged Francis to apply himself to his Latin, to improve it by using an all-Latin prayerbook, and to read good Catholic books. Fr. Finn credited his vocation to this advice and to his membership in the Sodality of Our Lady. Before 1865, most American Catholic Literature was either translated from French, German, or Flemish books, or reprints from English and Irish works.

At St. Mary's College Finn learned how to teach and discipline boys. If they promised to behave, he promised to tell them a story. He began with Oliver Twist. One afternoon while supervising a class busy writing a composition, Mr. Finn thought of how they represented to him the typical American Catholic boy. With nothing else to do, he took up pencil and paper. “Why not write about such boys as are before me?” he asked himself. In no time at all he had dashed off the first chapter of Tom Playfair. He went on to write twenty six more. According to the American Catholic Who’s Who, Fr. Finn is “universally acknowledged the foremost Catholic writer of fiction for young people.” It was Fr. Finn’s lifelong conviction that “One of the greatest things in the world is to get the right book into the hands of the right boy or girl. No one can indulge in reading to any extent without being largely influenced for better or worse.”

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