By the mid-teens he felt called to be this revolution’s literary chronicler.Ĭritical success soon followed. There he watched a remarkable social revolution unfold as new, democratic manners replaced older, aristocratic ones, and new technologies, especially the automobile, transformed the way people related, physically and imaginatively, to time and space. Indianapolis was Tarkington’s primary home and literary inspiration, where he observed a new commercial order, with new families at its vanguard, take root.
Then a city of some 50,000, Tarkington would see his hometown grow ten-fold before his death in 1946. Tarkington was born in 1869 to an upper middle-class (but not wealthy) family in Indianapolis. As 2019 is the 150th anniversary of Tarkington’s birth-and the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Magnificent Ambersons, his best-known novel-the timing is apt. That the only author to win two Pulitzer Prizes for his novels had to wait until the timeless works of James Weldon Johnson, Charles Brockden Brown, David Goodis, and May Swenson had been issued says a good deal about literary politics-but at least the wrong has been righted. 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.After 319 volumes over 40 years the Library of America (LOA) has finally collected three books by Newton Booth Tarkington. " 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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.
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