Description: Here are three indispensable works from the Pulitzer Prize-winning laureate of the American heartland, including the novels that inspired a classic film by Orson Welles and an Oscar-nominated performance by Katharine Hepburn. The Magnificent Ambersons depicts the fall from grace of George Minafer, scion of the once-unassailable Amberson family whose wealth and grandeur are in precipitous decline. Alice Adams, perhaps Booth Tarkington's greatest work, offers a psychologically nuanced portrait of a self-aware young woman whose social prospects are rapidly diminishing. Tarkington's gifts as a story writer are displayed in the collection In the Arena: Stories of Political Life, published not long after he served as an Indiana state representative and drawing unforgettable from his firsthand encounter with the rough-and-tumble of real-world politics. With original illustrations from the first editions, helpful annotation, and a newly researched chronology of Tarkington's life and career.
Review Quotes: "The estimable Library of America may revive [Tarkington's] reputation with a hefty placemark in the canon. . . . The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams won Pulitzer Prizes, in 1919 and 1922, a rare double for a single author. One can see why readers devoured them, and . . . one can see why Scott Fitzgerald was influenced by his best sentences. . . .His satirical asides are perfectly modern." -- The Wall Street Journal
"Alice Adams is by far Tarkington's most accomplished novel--worthy of being compared to Wharton's The House of Mirth." -- The New Yorker