Lad was an eighty-pound collie, thoroughbred in spirit as well as in blood. Albert Payson Terhune published a number of short stories about his first collie, the loyal and courageous Lad, in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal. In 1919 he gathered a dozen of these stories and published his first dog novel, Lad, A Dog, which celebrated both his beloved pet and Sunnybank, Terhune's childhood home on the shores of Pompton Lake, New Jersey. Terhune became one of the most famous and successful American writers in the 1920s and 1930s, and went on to publish more than 30 dog-focused novels, including Lad of Sunnybank in 1929. These classic books continue to instill the love of dogs in countless readers.