Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summer Time and the Baxter Family Especially William is a humorous novel by Booth Tarkington that gently satirizes first love, in the person of a callow 17-year-old, William Sylvanus Baxter. Seventeen takes place in a small city in the Midwestern United States shortly before World War I. It was published as sketches in the Metropolitan Magazine in 1914, and collected in a single volume in 1916, when it was the bestselling novel in the United States.