The Magnificent Ambersons
Booth Tarkington, 1918
Random House-Modern Library
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375752506
Summary
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." (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 29, 1869
• Where—Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
• Death—May 19, 1946
• Where—Indianapolis, Indiana
• Education—Purdue Univesity; Princeton University (no degrees)
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize (twice); O. Henry Memorial Award
Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. He is, with William Faulkner and John Updike, one of only three novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.
Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. He was named after his maternal uncle, Newton Booth, then the governor of California. Tarkington was also related to Chicago Mayor James Hutchinson Woodworth through his wife Almyra Booth Woodworth.
Education
Tarkington first attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, but completed his secondary education at Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school on the East Coast.
He attended Purdue University for two years, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity and the university's Morley Eating Club. Tarkington later made substantial donations to Purdue for the building of an all-men's residence hall, which the university named Tarkington Hall, in his honor. Purdue awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Princeton
When some of his family's wealth returned after the Panic of 1873 his mother transferred Booth from Purdue to Princeton University. At Princeton, Tarkington is said to have been known among his fellow Eating Club members as "Tark." He was active as a student-actor and served as president of Princeton's Dramatic Association, which later became the Triangle Club.
While an undergraduate he is known to have socialized with Woodrow Wilson, an associate graduate member of the Ivy Club. Wilson returned to Princeton as a member of the political science faculty shortly before Tarkington matriculated; they maintained contact throughout Wilson's life.
Tarkington failed to earn his undergraduate degree, the A.B., because of missing a single course in the classics. Nevertheless, his place within campus society was already determined, and he was voted "most popular" by the class of 1893.
Honors and awards
Although never earning a college degree, Tarkington was accorded awards recognizing and honoring his skills and accomplishments as an author. 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. Princeton's conferral of more than one honorary degree on a single alumnus remains a university record.
In addition to the honorary degrees from Princeton, he was also awarded honorary doctorates from Purdue and Columbia University, as well as from several other universities.
He won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction twice, in 1919 and 1922, for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. In 1921 booksellers rated him "the most significant contemporary American author" in a poll conducted by Publishers' Weekly.
He won the O. Henry Memorial Award in 1931 for his short story "Cider of Normandy." His works appeared frequently on best sellers lists throughout his life.
Midwesterner
Tarkington was an unabashed Midwestern regionalist, if somewhat of a world traveler, and set much of his fiction in his native Indiana. In 1902, he served one term in the Indiana House of Representatives as a Republican.
Tarkington saw such public service as a responsibility of gentlemen in his socio-economic class, and consistent with his family's extensive record of public service. This experience provided the foundation for his book In the Arena: Stories of Political Life. While his service as an Indiana legislator was his only official public service position, he remained politically conservative his entire life. He supported Prohibition, opposed FDR, and worked against FDR's New Deal.
Recognition
Tarkington was one of the more popular American novelists of his time. The Two Vanrevels and Mary's Neck appeared on the annual best-seller lists a total of nine times. The Penrod novels depict a typical upper-middle class American boy of 1910 vintage, revealing a fine, bookish sense of American humor. At one time, his Penrod series was as well known as Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Much of Tarkington's work consists of satirical and closely observed studies of the American class system and its foibles. He himself came from a patrician Midwestern family that lost much of its wealth after the Panic of 1873. Today, he is best known for his novel The Magnificent Ambersons, which Orson Welles filmed in 1942. It is included in the Modern Library's list of top-100 novels. As the second volume in Tarkington's Growth trilogy, it contrasted the decline of the "old money" Amberson dynasty with the rise of "new money" industrial tycoons in the years between the American Civil War and World War I.
Tarkington dramatized several of his novels; some were eventually filmed. He also collaborated with Harry Leon Wilson to write three plays. In 1928, he published a book of reminiscences, The World Does Move. He illustrated the books of others, including a 1933 reprint of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as his own. He took a close interest in fine art and collectibles, and was a trustee of the John Herron Art Museum.
Personal
Tarkington was married to Laurel Fletcher from 1902 until their divorce in 1911. Their only child, Laurel, was born in 1906 and died in 1923. He married Susanah Keifer Robinson in 1912. They had no children. Tarkington began losing his eyesight in the 1920s and was blind in his later years. He continued producing his works by dictating to a secretary.
Tarkington maintained a home in his native Indiana, at 4270 North Meridian in Indianapolis. From 1923 until his death, Tarkington spent summers and then much of his later life in Kennebunkport, Maine, at his much loved home, Seawood.
In Kennebunkport he was well known as a sailor, and his schooner, the Regina, survived him. Regina was moored next to Tarkington's boathouse, The Floats which he also used as his studio. His extensively renovated studio is now the Kennebunkport Maritime Museum. It was from his home in Maine that he and his wife Susannah established their relation with nearby Colby College.
Legacy
Tarkington made a gift of some his papers to Princeton University, his alma mater, and his wife Susannah, who survived him by over 20 years, made a separate gift of his remaining papers to Colby College after his death.
Purdue University's library holds many of his works in its Special Collection's Indiana Collection. Indianapolis commemorates his impact on literature and the theatre, and his contributions as a Midwesterner and "son of Indiana" in its Booth Tarkington Civic Theatre. He is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.
Indianapolis Public Elementary School #92 is named after Booth Tarkington.
In an Atlantic Monthly (May 2004) essay "Hoosiers: The Lost World of Booth Tarkington," Thomas Mallon wrote of Tarkington that "only general ignorance of his work has kept him from being pressed into contemporary service as a literary environmentalist—not just a "conservationist," in the TR mode, but an emerald-Green decrier of internal combustion:
The automobile, whose production was centered in Indianapolis before World War I, became the snorting, belching villain that, along with soft coal, laid waste to Tarkington's Edens. His objections to the auto were aesthetic—in The Midlander (1923) automobiles sweep away the more beautifully named "phaetons" and "surreys"—but also something far beyond that. Dreiser, his exact Indiana contemporary, might look at the Model T and see wage slaves in need of unions and sit-down strikes; Tarkington saw pollution, and a filthy tampering with human nature itself. "No one could have dreamed that our town was to be utterly destroyed," he wrote in The World Does Move. His important novels are all marked by the soul-killing effects of smoke and asphalt and speed, and even in Seventeen, Willie Baxter fantasizes about winning Miss Pratt by the rescue of precious little Flopit from an automobile's rushing wheels.
(Autor bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/13/2015.)
Book Reviews
An admirable study of character and of American life.
New York Times (10/20/1918)
The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington's best novel.... [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.
Van Wyck Brooks (literary critic and scholar, 1886-1963)
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Magnificent Ambersons:
1. What aspect of society is Tarkington taking aim at in The Magnificent Ambersons? Do you consider the novel's concerns dated in any way, or can comparisons be made to our own era?
2. Talk about George Amberson Minafer, the central character of the novel. What is your impression of him? Do you find him at all sympathetic? Do your sympathies ever change? Is the author's characterization of George flat or overly one-sided, to the point of making him a cartoonish figure? Or is George a fully-realized character with depth and understandable motives and/or explanations for his actions?
3. Was the Amberson family decline inevitable given the pace of change in the early 20th century? Consider the Morgan family fate; why was that family's outcome different? Was George Minifer's stance against modernity one of principle or of blinded stubbornness...or what?
4. Talk about the question George's friend asks: "Don't you think being things is 'rahthuh bettuh' than doing things?" Also, take notice the spelling of "rather better" as "rahthuh bettuh"—what does that imply?
5. In what way do Lucy's beliefs contrast with George's? Given their differences, why would she find him attractive?
6. Discuss the tangle of relationships among George and Lucy Morgan and Isabel and Eugene Morgan. Talk about what happens at the end when George undercuts his own mother.
7. Is progress all bad? Where do you think Tarkington stands on this question?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)