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Booth Tarkington

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Template:Short description Template:Use American English Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox writer Newton Booth Tarkington (July 29, 1869 – May 19, 1946) was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921). He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. In the 1910s and 1920s he was considered the United States' greatest living author.<ref name="newyorker">Template:Cite magazine</ref> Several of his stories were adapted to film.

During the first quarter of the 20th century, Tarkington, along with Meredith Nicholson, George Ade, and James Whitcomb Riley helped to create a Golden Age of literature in Indiana.

Booth Tarkington served one term in the Indiana House of Representatives, was critical of the advent of automobiles, and set many of his stories in the Midwest. He eventually moved to Kennebunkport, Maine, where he continued his life work even as he suffered a loss of vision.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

He is often cited as an example of an author who enjoyed great success when alive, but whose reputation and influence did not survive his death.

Early life and educationEdit

Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on July 29, 1869,<ref name="obituary star">Template:Cite news</ref> the son of John S. Tarkington, a judge,<ref name="Wabash">Template:Cite book</ref> and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. He came from a patrician Midwestern family that had lost much of its wealth after the Panic of 1873.Template:Citation needed Tarkington was named after his maternal uncle Newton Booth, then the governor of California. He was also related to Chicago Mayor James Hutchinson Woodworth through Woodworth's wife, Almyra Booth Woodworth.Template:Citation needed

Tarkington attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, and completed his secondary education at Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school on the East Coast.<ref name=Indythen/> He attended Purdue University for two years, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity and the university's Morley Eating Club.

Some of his family's wealth returned after the Panic of 1873, and his mother transferred Booth from Purdue to Princeton University. At Princeton, Tarkington is said to have been known as "Tark" among the members of the Ivy Club, the first of Princeton's historic eating clubs.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He had also been in a short-lived eating club called "Ye Plug and Ulster," which became Colonial Club.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Bric a Brac Yearbook, Princeton University, 1892, listed as "N. B. Tarkington."</ref> He was active as an actor and served as president of Princeton's Dramatic Association, which later became the Triangle Club, of which he was a founding member according to Triangle's official history.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Tarkington made his first acting appearance in the club's Shakespearean spoof Katherine, one of the first three productions in the Triangle's history written and produced by students. Tarkington established the Triangle tradition, still alive as of 2014, of producing students' plays.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Tarkington returned to the Triangle stage as Cassius in the 1893 production of a play he co-authored, The Honorable Julius Caesar. He edited Princeton's Nassau Literary Magazine, known more recently as The Nassau Lit.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> While an undergraduate, he 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 departed; they maintained contact throughout Wilson's life.Template:Cn Tarkington failed to earn his undergraduate 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.Template:Cn

CareerEdit

Tarkington's first successful novel was The Gentleman from Indiana (1899).<ref name="Wabash" /> In 1902–1903, he served one term as a Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives, an experience reflected in his 1905 short story collection, In The Arena.<ref name="avenel">Template:Cite book</ref>

As a novelist, Tarkington was both prolific and commercially successful. During the 15-year period from 1914 to 1928, seven of his novels ranked among the top ten best-selling books of the year: Penrod (1914), The Turmoil (#1 best seller of 1915), Seventeen (#1 best seller of 1916), Gentle Julia (1922), The Midlander (1924), The Plutocrat (1927) and Claire Ambler (1928).<ref name="hackett">Template:Cite book</ref> He produced both of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels during the same period.

File:Penrod - cover page.jpg
Cover page for Penrod, depicting Penrod Schofield and his dog Duke (1914)

Two of his novels achieved longer-term commercial success. Penrod was one of a select group of novels that sold more than 750,000 copies during the period 1895–1975, according to Publishers Weekly book sales data from that period.<ref name="hackett" /> At one time, his Penrod series was as well known as Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.Template:Citation needed Seventeen, a coming-of-age story, sold some 1.7 million copies during the 1895–1975 period. Although written for an adult audience, it came to be regarded as a children's book and was one of the best-selling books of the era in that category.<ref name="hackett" />

The Two Vanrevels and Mary's Neck appeared on the annual best-seller lists a total of nine times.Template:Citation needed

Tarkington authored 25 plays, including three collaborations with Harry Leon Wilson. Some of the plays dramatized his novels.<ref name="avenel"/> Some were eventually filmed, including Monsieur Beaucaire, Presenting Lily Mars, and The Adventures and Emotions of Edgar Pomeroy, made into a serialized film in 1920 and 1921. In 1928, he published a book of reminiscences, The World Does Move.

ThemesEdit

Tarkington was an unabashed Midwestern regionalist and set much of his fiction in his native Indiana. His style has been compared to that of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells.<ref name="avenel" />

Much of Tarkington's work consists of satirical and closely observed studies of the American class system and its foibles. Themes of the nouveau riche and upward social mobility appear frequently in his books.<ref name="avenel" />

Awards and recognitionEdit

LiteraryEdit

While Tarkington never earned a college degree, he was accorded many awards recognizing and honoring his skills and accomplishments as an author. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, in 1919 and 1922, for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and Alice Adams.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Other achievements include:

  • Booksellers rated him "the most significant contemporary American author" in a 1921 poll conducted by Publishers Weekly. In 1922, The Literary Digest called him America's greatest living author, and The New York Times selected him as one of the 10 greatest living Americans.<ref name="claremont">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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HonoraryEdit

Tarkington's honorary degrees included an A.M. and a Litt.D. from Princeton, and honorary doctorates from Columbia University and Purdue. He made substantial donations to Purdue for building an all-men's residence hall, which the university named Tarkington Hall in his honor.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Personal lifeEdit

Tarkington was married to Laura Louisa Fletcher from 1902 until their divorce in 1911. Their only child, Laurel, was born in 1906 and died in 1923. Fletcher, a published poet (and aunt of 1930s gay Hollywood nightclub performer Bruz Fletcher), was involved in adapting his fiction for the stage.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Her prosperous Indiana banking family is thought to be the model for certain characters in Tarkington's writing.<ref name="Wabash" />

Tarkington's second marriage was to Susanah Keifer Robinson in 1912. They had no children.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Tarkington began losing his eyesight in the 1920s. He continued producing his works by dictating to his secretary Elizabeth Trotter.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Despite his failing eyesight, between 1928 and 1940 he edited several historical novels by his Kennebunkport, Maine, neighbor Kenneth Roberts, who described Tarkington as a "co-author" of his later books and dedicated three of them (Rabble in Arms, Northwest Passage, and Oliver Wiswell) to him.

Tarkington underwent eye surgery in February 1929. In August 1930, he suffered a complete loss in his eyesight and was rushed from Maine to Baltimore for surgery on his right eye. He had an additional two operations in the latter half of 1930. In 1931, after five months of blindness, he underwent a fifth and final operation. The surgery resulted in a significant restoration in his eyesight. However, his physical energy was diminished for the remainder of his life.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="newyorker"/>

Tarkington maintained a home in his native Indiana at 4270 North Meridian Street in Indianapolis. From 1923 until his death,<ref name=Indythen>Template:Cite book</ref> Tarkington spent summers and then much of his later life in Kennebunkport 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.<ref name="Colby">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> It was from his home in Maine that he and his wife Susannah established their relation with nearby Colby College.

File:Tarkington - Jameson Mausoleum - June 2022 - Sarah Stierch.jpg
Tarkington is interred in the Tarkington-Jameson mausoleum at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Tarkington took a close interest in fine art and collectibles<ref name="obituary star" /> and was a trustee of the John Herron Art Institute. He made a gift of some his papers to Princeton, 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.

Tarkington died on May 19, 1946, aged 76, in his home in Indianapolis. He was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery.<ref name="obituary star"/>

LegacyEdit

In the 1910s and 1920s, Tarkington was regarded as "the most important and lasting writer of his generation",<ref name="woodless">Template:Cite journal</ref> perhaps as important as Mark Twain. His works were reprinted many times, were often on best-seller lists, won many prizes, and were adapted into other media. Penrod and its two sequels were regular birthday presents for bookish boys.Template:Citation needed

By the later twentieth century, however, he was ignored in academia: no congresses, no society, no journal of Tarkington Studies.Template:Citation needed In 1981, The Avenue (Penguin) Companion to English and American Literature described him as "the epitome of the middle-brow American novelist."<ref name="avenel" /> In 1985, he was cited as an example of the great discrepancy possible between an author's fame when alive and oblivion later. According to this view, if an author succeeds at pleasing his or her contemporaries—and Tarkington's works have not a whiff of social criticism—he or she is not going to please later readers of inevitably different values and concerns.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In 2004, author and critic Thomas Mallon noted: "Entirely absent from most current histories of American writing, Tarkington was generally scorned by those published just before or after his death."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 2019, Robert Gottlieb wrote that Tarkington "dwindled into America's most distinguished hack." Gottlieb criticized Tarkington's anti-modernist perspective, "his deeply rooted, unappeasable need to look longingly backward, an impulse that goes beyond nostalgia," for preventing him from "producing so little of real substance."<ref name="newyorker"/>

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 Template:Bracket 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.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

In June 2019, the Library of America published Booth Tarkington: Novels & Stories, collecting The Magnificent Ambersons, Alice Adams, and In the Arena: Stories of Political Life.

WorksEdit

Template:Multiple image

TrilogiesEdit

PenrodEdit

  1. Penrod (1914)
  2. Penrod and Sam (1916)
  3. Penrod Jashber (1929)

Two film musicals were loosely based on the Penrod series, On Moonlight Bay (1951) and its sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1954), with Doris Day and Gordon MacRae.

GrowthEdit

  1. The Turmoil (1915)
  2. The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)
    Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize
    Adapted for a 1942 film by Orson Welles and a 2002 television movie
  3. The Midlander (1923, re-titled National Avenue in 1927)

NovelsEdit

  • The Gentleman from Indiana (1899)
  • Monsieur Beaucaire (1900)
  • Old Gray Eagle (1901)
  • The Two Vanrevels (October 1902)
  • Cherry (October 1903)
  • In the Arena (January 1905)
  • The Beautiful Lady (May 1905)
  • The Conquest of Canaan (October 1905)
  • His Own People (October 1907)
  • The Guest of Quesnay (1908)
  • Beasley's Christmas Party (October 1909)
  • Beauty and the Jacobin, an Interlude of the French Revolution (1912)
  • The Flirt (1913)
    • Adapted for film in 1922 and has since been lost.
  • Seventeen (1916)
  • The Spring Concert (1916)
  • The Rich Man's War (1917)
  • Ramsey Milholland (1919)
  • Alice Adams (1921)
  • Gentle Julia (1922)
  • Women (1925)
  • The Plutocrat (1927)
  • Claire Ambler (1928)
  • The World Does Move (1928)
  • Mirthful Haven (1930)
  • Mary's Neck (1932)
  • Presenting Lily Mars (1933)
    • Adapted for film in 1943
  • Rumbin Galleries (1934, romantic novel)
  • Little Orvie (1934)
  • Horse and Buggy Days (1936)
  • The Lorenzo Bunch (1936)
  • The Fighting Littles (1941)
  • The Heritage of Hatcher Ide (1941)
  • Kate Fennigate (1943)
  • Image of Josephine (1945)
  • The Show Piece (1947, posthumously published)

Short story collectionsEdit

  • In the Arena: Stories of Political Life (1905)
  • The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories (1923)

Short storiesEdit

  • War Stories (1919, one of Tarkington's stories was included in this anthology)

CollectionsEdit

  • Poe's Run: and other poems … to which is appended the book of the chronicles of the Elis (1904, co-author, with M'Cready Sykes)
  • Harlequin and Columbine (1921)

Non-fictionEdit

  • What the Victory or Defeat of Germany Means to Every American (1917)
  • The Collector's Whatnot (1923)
  • Just Princeton (1924)
  • Looking Forward, and Others (1926)
    Contains "Looking Forward to the Great Adventure", "Nipskillions", "The Hopeful Pessimist", "Stars in the Dust-heap", "The Golden Age" and "Happiness Now"
  • The World Does Move (1929)
  • Some Old Portraits (1939; essays on 17th century artworks)
  • What We've Got to Do (1942)
  • Booth Tarkington On Dogs (1944)
  • Your Amiable Uncle (1949, posthumously published)
  • On Plays, Playwrights, and Playgoers (1959, posthumously published)

PlaysEdit

ReferencesEdit

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External linksEdit

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Online editionsEdit

Template:PulitzerPrize Fiction 1918–1925 Template:Booth Tarkington

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