(The novel begins with Virgil Adams confined to bed with a...)
The novel begins with Virgil Adams confined to bed with an unnamed illness. There is tension between Virgil and his wife over how he should go about recovering, and she pressures him not to return to work for J. A. Lamb once he is well. Alice, their daughter, attempts to keep peace in the family (with mixed results) before walking to her friend Mildred Palmer's house to see what Mildred will wear to a dance that evening.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
(A timeless novel in the spirited tradition of The Adventu...)
A timeless novel in the spirited tradition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn One of the most popular American authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pulitzer Prize winner Booth Tarkington was acclaimed for his novels set in small Midwestern towns. Penrod tells of a boy growing up in Indianapolis at the turn of the twentieth century. His friends and his dog accompany him on his many jaunts, from the stage as the Child Sir Lancelot, to the playground, to school. They make names for themselves as bad boys who always have the most fun. Nearly a century after it was first published to incredible popularity and acclaim, Penrod remains wildly funny and entertaining to adults and children alike.
(This book, "The wren; a comedy in three acts", by Tarking...)
This book, "The wren; a comedy in three acts", by Tarkington Booth, is a replication of a book originally published before 1922. It has been restored by human beings, page by page, so that you may enjoy it in a form as close to the original as possible. This book was created using print-on-demand technology. Thank you for supporting classic literature.
(Leopold Classic Library is delighted to publish this clas...)
Leopold Classic Library is delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive collection. As part of our on-going commitment to delivering value to the reader, we have also provided you with a link to a website, where you may download a digital version of this work for free. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. Whilst the books in this collection have not been hand curated, an aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature. As a result of this book being first published many decades ago, it may have occasional imperfections. These imperfections may include poor picture quality, blurred or missing text. While some of these imperfections may have appeared in the original work, others may have resulted from the scanning process that has been applied. However, our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. While some publishers have applied optical character recognition (OCR), this approach has its own drawbacks, which include formatting errors, misspelt words, or the presence of inappropriate characters. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with an experience that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic book, and that the occasional imperfection that it might contain will not detract from the experience.
The Magnificent Ambersons (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)
(Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nov...)
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class.
Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known through the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but as the critic Stanley Kauffmann noted, "It is high time that the novel appear again, to stand outside the force of Welles's genius, confident in its own right."
"The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington's best novel," judged Van Wyck Brooks. "It is a typical story of an American family and town--the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city. This novel no doubt was a permanent page in the social history of the United States, so admirably conceived and written was the tale of the Ambersons, their house, their fate and the growth of the community in which they were submerged in the end."
Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams.
Background
Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on July 29, 1869. He was the younger of two children and only son of John Stevenson Tarkington, a lawyer and county judge, and Elizabeth (Booth) Tarkington. His paternal grandfather, Joseph Tarkington, had come north from his native Tennessee to the free soil of Indiana, where he became a circuit-riding Methodist preacher. His mother's family traced its ancestry back to Thomas Hooker, founder of Connecticut. The boy was christened Newton Booth after his mother's brother, who served California as governor and, later, as United States senator; but he early dropped his first name.
Education
His principal ambition, however, was to become a writer and illustrator. He cultivated both skills at Phillips Exeter Academy, where he took his last two years of high school; at Purdue University (1890 - 1891); and at Princeton University (1891 - 1893), where he studied as a special student and served as editor, writer, and illustrator for several student publications and headed the Triangle Club; but, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, he did not manage to secure a degree.
In his adult life, he was twice asked to return to Princeton for the conferral of honorary degrees, an A. M. in 1899 and a Litt. D. in 1918. The conferral of more than one honorary degree on an alumnus(a) of Princeton University remains a university record.
Career
In 1899 he published his successful first novel, The Gentleman From Indiana; followed it the next year with the popular historical romance Monsieur Beaucaire; and was launched on a career as a prolific novelist and playwright.
His books ultimately totaled more than forty-five.
Tarkington's great public and critical successes belonged to the decade 1914-1924, when he wrote his best-known books of childhood and adolescence, Penrod (1914), Penrod and Sam (1916), Seventeen (1916), and Gentle Julia (1922); his two Pulitzer Prize novels, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921); and two other mature novels, The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1924), into whose fabric, as in that of the Pulitzer winners, the author threaded a satiric commentary on the American worship of bigness, of growth for growth's sake. Toward the end of this period, Tarkington's reputation reached its zenith. A 1921 Publishers' Weekly poll of booksellers named him the most significant of contemporary authors. In a Literary Digest contest in 1922 he was voted the greatest living American writer, and a New York Times poll of the same year put him on a list of the ten greatest contemporary Americans.
Tarkington's work, however, has ill survived the test of time; half a century later, his serious novels were scarcely read at all and even his juvenile entertainments were out of favor. In several ways, Tarkington's fiction rather more resembled that of his mentor Howells than that of younger men who were beginning, in the early 1920's, to make more durable reputations. Tarkington's writing is, for example, entirely genteel in sexual matters. Further, there is an undercurrent of good nature in even his most satirical work, so that although Tarkington lampooned the booster in the figure of The Turmoil's Bibbs Sheridan well in advance of Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, he sensed instinctively that Lewis, whose satire was so much more bitter and heavy-handed, was "among the people I don't want to sit down with. " Similarly, a 1925 interview in Paris with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway went rather badly, for Fitzgerald arrived a little drunk (Tarkington, once a prodigious drinker, had converted to teetotaling) and both young writers looked as if they had been up all night.
Tarkington also remained an optimist well past the time when optimism seemed a viable literary attitude. In 1900 he declared his preference for comedy over tragedy and his impatience with writers like Victor Hugo and Ouida, who had perfected "the trick of agony. " In his own fiction, he added, he would try to make the reader feel himself "full of courage and the capacity for happiness in a brightened world"; and although Tarkington's late work hardly reflects so rosy a view of the world (he created, for example, a series of selfish, egoistic women who make life miserable for their mates), he went on to provide more than his share, by twentieth-century standards, of happy endings. It could also be argued that Tarkington wrote too much and that too much of what he did write was ephemera designed for such popular magazines as the Saturday Evening Post.
Furthermore, he was frequently diverted from his talent for prose fiction, most notably by the lure of the stage. In all, Tarkington wrote some twenty plays, including such successes as The Man From Home (first performed in 1907), The Country Cousin (1917), and Clarence (1919), which starred the young Alfred Lunt. A number of these plays Tarkington wrote in genial collaboration with Harry Leon Wilson; for The Country Cousin his coauthor was young Julian Street, and Tarkington with characteristic generosity shared revenues with Street equally even though Tarkington single-handedly rewrote the original script. During his summers in Maine, Tarkington exhibited similar kindness in encouraging and aiding the career of Kenneth Roberts, then making a start as a novelist. He freely donated much of his substantial earnings to such organizations as the Seeing Eye, Inc. , the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Symphony, Princeton, and Exeter.
During both world wars, Tarkington threw himself into war work, writing propaganda gratis at the request of government departments and agencies.
The principal reason for the decline of Tarkington's reputation as a writer, however, is probably his authorial attitude of superiority. Gifted at creating the atmosphere of a particular time and place, always sensitive to nuances, keenly aware of the relationship between social class and economic success, and brilliant in his command of the spoken language, Tarkington wrote as well as anyone of the American middle class in the early decades of the twentieth entury. But he rarely created a character with whom he, or the reader, could identify. Even the much-loved Penrod does not age well, but remains a book for boys (who may feel a certain empathy for Penrod) and not for adults (who are likely, with the author, to laugh down at the "marvelous boy" from above). Moreover, Tarkington spices his narrative with the comic relief afforded by the loutish Negroes Herman and Verman, and Penrod's semivillainous antagonist is a rich Jewish boy named Maurice Levy. In Seventeen, as well, the author's point of view, which the reader is invited to adopt, is that of condescending amusement at the trials of Willie Baxter in the midst of his awkward adolescence. Nor did Tarkington shift his authorial attitude in the Indiana novels of his major period, when he traced the rise and fall of the Sheridan and Amberson families. In The Turmoil, Tarkington had indeed succeeded, as Howells remarked, in casting off the spell of his early romanticism, but he did not go on, as the older writer had written him that he must, to "be one of the greatest. " Even in the best of his movels, the fine Alice Adams, Tarkington takes up a position above and slightly to the right of his characters, and as he manipulates them, however gently, one detects the strings of the puppet master. Perhaps it was this quality of remote amusement that Scott Fitzgerald was determined to avoid when he warned himself, at the end of his final notes for The Last Tycoon, "Don't wake the Tarkington ghosts. "
He died of a lung collapse following hemiplegia in Indianapolis and was buried there at Crown Hill Cemetery.
(The novel begins with Virgil Adams confined to bed with a...)
Views
Quotations:
"An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband. "
"Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough. "
"The only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody. "
"It is love in old age, no longer blind, that is true love. For the love's highest intensity doesn't necessarily mean it's highest quality. "
"There aren't any old times. When times are gone they're not old, they're dead! There aren't any times but new times!"
Membership
He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1908 (he was elected to the Academy in 1920).
He was a founding member of The Triangle Club, he was also among the earliest members of the Ivy Club, the first of Princeton's historic Eating Clubs.
Personality
He had troubles with his eyes (at one time precariously close to blindness).
Connections
Tarkington married Laurel Louisa Fletcher, the daughter of a prominent Indianapolis banker, on June 18, 1902, but the marriage ended in divorce. His second marriage, on November 6, 1912, to the widowed Susannah (Keifer) Robinson, was by all accounts an extraordinarily happy one. Laurel, Tarkington's only child, was born in 1906 and died at seventeen.