Booth Tarkington

Biography

Booth Tarkington was the son of John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington, and named after his maternal uncle Newton Booth, then the governor of California. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Purdue University for two years, followed by Princeton University for two years, graduating from neither. He later made substantial donations to Purdue, which gratefully named Tarkington Hall, an all-men's residence hall at Purdue, in his honor.http://www.housing.purdue.edu/HTML/HOUSTarkington.htm

While at Princeton he edited the Nassau Literary Magazine, was admitted to the The Ivy Club, and founded the Princeton Triangle Club, and was voted the most popular man in the class of 1893. His later achievements eventually earned him two honorary Princeton degrees, an A.M. in 1899 and a Litt.D. in 1918.

Tarkington was a world traveller who spent much of his later life in Kennebunkport Maine, and left his papers to Colby College. At the same time, he was also an unabashed Midwestern regionalist, and set much of his fiction in his native Indiana. One of the more popular American novelists of his time, his 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, and reveal a fine bookish American sense of humor.

Tarkington dramatized several of his novels; some were eventually filmed. In 1928, he published a book of reminiscences, The World Does Move. He illustrated the books of others, including a 1933 reprint 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. In 1902, he served in the Indiana House of Representatives, which supplied the experiences for his book In the Arena: Stories of Political Life.

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 family that came down in the world 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. The second volume in Tarkington's Growth trilogy, it contrasted the decline of the "old money" Amberson dynasty against the rise of "new money" industrial tycoons in the years between the Civil War and World War I.

Tarkington divorced his first wife in 1911, and remarried the following year. His only child died young.

Bibliography

Julia; frontispiece of a 1922 New York publication of Gentle Julia, by Booth Tarkington

• The Gentleman from Indiana (1899)
• Monsieur Beaucaire (1900; later adapted as a play, an operetta and two films?1924 and 1946)
• Cherry (1901 - January, February Harper's Magazine) (1903 - Book)
• The Two Vanrevels (1902)
• In the Arena: Stories of Political Life (1905)
• The Beautiful Lady (1905)
• Beasley's Christmas Party (1909)
• Beauty and the Jacobin, an Interlude of the French Revolution (1912)
• Penrod (1914)
• The Turmoil (1915) (first volume of the trilogy Growth)
• Penrod and Sam (1916)
• Seventeen (1916)
• The Magnificent Ambersons (1918; won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize; filmed 1941 by Orson Welles, remade for TV in 2002; second volume of the trilogy Growth)
• Alice Adams (1921; won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize; filmed 1935)
• Gentle Julia (1922)
• The Midlander (1924) (1927 re-titled National Avenue; third volume of the trilogy Growth)
• The Plutocrat (1927)
• Claire Ambler (1928)
• Penrod Jashber (1929)
• Mirthful Haven (1930)
• Mary's Neck (1932)
• The Fighting Littles (1941)
• Presenting Lily Mars (1933) (filmed 1943)
• Kate Fennigate (1943)

External links

• Works by Booth Tarkington at Internet Archive
• PoliticalGraveyard.com entry
• Bio from Colby College collection of his papers

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