Booth Tarkington | |
|---|---|
 Booth Tarkington (1922) | |
| Born | Newton Booth Tarkington July 29, 1869 Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
| Died | May 19, 1946 (aged 76) Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, dramatist |
| Alma mater | Purdue University Princeton University |
| Years active | 1899–1946 |
| Notable works |
|
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1919, 1922) |
| Spouse | Louisa Fletcher
(m. 1902; div. 1911)Susanah Keifer Robinson
(m. 1912) |
| Children | 1 |
| Signature | |
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| Member of the Indiana House of Representatives | |
| In office 1902–1903 | |
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.[1] 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.[2]
Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on July 29, 1869,[3] the son of John S. Tarkington, a judge,[4] and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. He came from a patrician Midwestern family that had lost much of its wealth after the Panic of 1873.[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.[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.[5] 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.[6] He had also been in a short-lived eating club called "Ye Plug and Ulster," which became Colonial Club.[7][8] 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.[9]
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 today, of producing students' plays.[10] 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.[11] 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. 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.
Many aspects of Tarkington's Princeton years and adult life were paralleled by the later life of another writer, fellow Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald.[citation needed]
Tarkington's first successful novel was The Gentleman from Indiana (1899).[4] 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.[12]
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).[13] He produced both of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels during the same period.
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.[13] At one time, his Penrod series was as well known as Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.[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.[13]
The Two Vanrevels and Mary's Neck appeared on the annual best-seller lists a total of nine times.[citation needed]
Tarkington authored 25 plays, including three collaborations with Harry Leon Wilson. Some of the plays dramatized his novels.[12] 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. He illustrated the books of others, including a 1933 reprint of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as his own.
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.[12]
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.[12]
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 in fiction twice, in 1919 and 1922, for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons[14] and Alice Adams.[15]
Other achievements include:
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.[18]
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, was involved in adapting his fiction for the stage.[19] Her prosperous Indiana banking family is thought to be the model for certain characters in Tarkington's writing.[4]
Tarkington's second marriage was to Susanah Keifer Robinson in 1912. They had no children.[20]
Tarkington began losing his eyesight in the 1920s. He continued producing his works by dictating to his secretary Elizabeth Trotter.[21] 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 Tarkington's eyesight. However, his physical energy was diminished for the remainder of his life.[22][1]
Tarkington maintained a home in his native Indiana at 4270 North Meridian Street in Indianapolis. From 1923 until his death,[5] 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.[23][24] It was from his home in Maine that he and his wife Susannah established their relation with nearby Colby College.
Tarkington took a close interest in fine art and collectibles[3] and was a trustee of the John Herron Art Institute. He 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.
Tarkington died on May 19, 1946, aged 76, in his home in Indianapolis. He was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery.[3]
In the 1910s and 1920s, Tarkington was regarded as "the most important and lasting writer of his generation",[25] 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.[citation needed]
By the later twentieth century, however, he was ignored in academia: no congresses, no society, no journal of Tarkington Studies.[citation needed] In 1981, The Avenue (Penguin) Companion to English and American Literature described him as "the epitome of the middle-brow American novelist."[12] 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.[26]
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."[27]
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."[1]
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.[28]
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.
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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.
What the Victory or Defeat of Germany Means to Every American (1917)
