Alice Adams
Alice Adams,novel by Booth Tarkington, published in 1921 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Alice, a pretty girl, anxious to escape her Midwestern lower-middle-class life, dreams of the stage or a rich marriage. Her father, Virgil Adams, nagged by his wife, leaves his lifelong job at Lamb's drug company, to open a glue factory with the formula he invented for Mr. Lamb. Alice, forsaken by local beaux because of her family's pushing ways, falls in love with a wealthy newcomer, Arthur Russell. To snare him she fabricates a web of small lies about herself and her family, which turns him against her when he sees the truth at a pathetic family dinner party. As their affair ends, her brother Walter absconds with the drug firm's money, and Virgil's new business is ruined by competition from Mr. Lamb, who nevertheless aids Virgil when he has a paralytic stroke. He recovers, his wife opens a boardinghouse to support him, and Alice, sadly wiser, becomes a...
[The entire page is 170 words long]