The Oxford Companion to American Literature | Tarkington, [Newton] Booth
Tarkington, [Newton] Booth( 1869–1946), Indiana novelist, first won popularity with his Monsieur Beaucaire (1900), the adventures in 18th-century England of the Duke of Orleans, who, disguised as a barber, has an affair with Lady Mary Carlisle from which he emerges a hero and she a cheat. Tarkington had already published The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), concerned with the crusade of a country editor against political corruption, and he now wrote a series of novels of life in the Middle West, of which two won Pulitzer Prizes: The Magnificent Ambersons(1918), the chronicle of three generations of a leading Indiana family and their decline during a period of transition, and Alice Adams (1921), a study of a commonplace girl whose illusions are destroyed when a love affair with a man above her in social rank is ended by his acquaintance with her mediocre family. Growth (1927) is the title given to his trilogy of Midwestern...
[The entire page is 326 words long]
Join eNotes
The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:
