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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)