A short life of the author
Newton Booth Tarkington (29 July 1869 – 19 May 1946) was an American novelist and dramatist who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice — for The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921) — and who was, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, one of the most widely read and critically respected American writers. His chronicles of Midwestern life, his comedies of adolescence, and his studies of social change during industrialisation earned him comparison to Balzac and Howells. His near-total eclipse after his death is one of the sharpest declines in American literary history.
Life
Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to a prosperous family. He attended Purdue University and Princeton (where he was active in the Triangle Club dramatic society), and returned to Indianapolis, which became the setting for most of his fiction. He served one term in the Indiana state legislature (1902–1903), and his political experience — the compromises, the deal-making, the gap between democratic ideals and practical governance — informed his fiction.
He was married twice and suffered from failing eyesight that left him nearly blind in his later years, though he continued to write by dictation.
The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)
Tarkington’s masterpiece traces the decline of the Amberson family — wealthy Indianapolis aristocrats — as their fortunes are eroded by the rise of industrial capitalism, the automobile, and suburban development. George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled, arrogant grandson, is the vehicle through which Tarkington examines the collision between old money and new enterprise.
The novel is the second volume of Tarkington’s “Growth” trilogy (with The Turmoil, 1915, and The Midlander, 1923), which together chronicle the transformation of an Indiana city from a quiet, tree-lined community of established families into a modern industrial metropolis.
Orson Welles’s 1942 film adaptation — mutilated by the studio but still extraordinary — introduced the novel to audiences who would never have read Tarkington, and has kept the title in cultural circulation long after the novel itself fell out of print.
Alice Adams (1921)
Tarkington’s second Pulitzer winner is the story of a young woman in a small Indiana city who is desperate to rise socially beyond her family’s declining middle-class status. Alice performs, pretends, and schemes — and her humiliation at a dinner party, where her pretensions are cruelly exposed, is one of the most painful scenes in American fiction. Katharine Hepburn starred in a superb 1935 film adaptation.
The novel anticipates many of the concerns of later American fiction — social performance, class anxiety, the gap between aspiration and reality — and its portrait of Alice is sympathetic, precise, and devastating.
The Penrod Books
Tarkington’s comedies of boyhood — Penrod (1914), Penrod and Sam (1916), and Penrod Jashber (1929) — follow the adventures of Penrod Schofield, a twelve-year-old boy in Indianapolis. They were enormously popular and are sometimes compared to Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer books, though they are lighter and less subversive.
Seventeen (1916) — about the agonies and absurdities of adolescent infatuation — was another major bestseller.
Critical Standing
Tarkington’s decline has been dramatic. In the 1920s, he was considered the equal of Edith Wharton and Sinclair Lewis; by the 1950s, he was regarded as a sentimental middlebrow; by the twenty-first century, he was essentially unread. The decline reflects genuine limitations — Tarkington was uncomfortable with the darker currents of modernism, and his later work became increasingly conventional — but also the vagaries of literary fashion. The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams deserve to be read, and both are better novels than their current reputations suggest.
Collecting Tarkington
The Magnificent Ambersons (1918, Doubleday) in first edition brings $200–$800. Alice Adams (1921, Doubleday) brings $100–$400. Penrod (1914, Doubleday) in first edition brings $50–$200. Tarkington’s prolific output means most titles are available and affordable.