Alice Adams

by Booth Tarkington

Overview

This Pulitizer Prize-winning novel, perhaps Tarkington's best, tells the story of a middle-class family living in the industrialized "midland country" at the turn of the 20th century. Alice Adams's resiliency of spirit makes her one of Tarkington's most compelling female characters.

About the Author:
Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis in 1889. He was a consummate interpreter of the Hoosier scene and a conscious booster of his native state, as evidenced in his best-selling Penrod adventures, Seventeen, and The Gentleman from Indiana. He was also, however, a serious and highly regarded writer, winning the Pulitzer Prize for the Magnificent Ambersons and for Alice Adams.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781530153237
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	02/20/2016
Pages:	442
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams are among the works of American author Newton Booth Tarkington, who was born on July 29, 1869, and died on May 19, 1946. (1921). He is one of just four authors who have twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He was regarded as the best-living novelist in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s. The son of John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth Booth, Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was given the name Newton Booth in honor of his maternal uncle. The Triangle Club, subsequently known as Triangle, was created with his help, and he began the custom of staging student plays there. A blatant Midwestern regionalist, Tarkington based a large portion of his novels in his home state of Indiana. He twice received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his books The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams, in 1919 and 1922. Given his family's long history of public service, Tarkington believed that gentlemen in his socioeconomic position had a duty to serve their communities. One of the more well-known American authors of his period was Tarkington. Satirical and meticulously documented analyses of the American class structure make up a large portion of Tarkington's writing.

Editorial Reviews

Over the pictures, the vases, the old brown plush rocking-chairs and the stool, over the three gilt chairs, over the new chintz-covered easy chair and the gray velure sofa—over everything everywhere, was the familiar coating of smoke and grime.... Yet here was not fault of housewifery; the curse could not be lifted, as the ingrained smudges permanent on the once white woodwork proved. The grime was perpetually renewed; scrubbing only ground it in.

From the Publisher

Tarkington’s story of ambition and delusion in an unnamed Midwestern town in the early twentieth century won a Pulitzer in 1922. It still packs a punch, though it hasn’t aged as well as some other works of the period, for instance, the novels of Sinclair Lewis. Traci Svendsgaard makes unfortunate choices in her reading that do nothing to minimize the dated quality of the dialogue. For no discernable reason, she plays the characters with exaggerated Southern country yokel accents, such that "well" becomes “way-ell,” and so forth. Flirty Alice is a complex character, but she’s presented here like a music hall ingénue with a most irritating wheedle to her voice. The story wins over the performance, but it could have been better served. B.G. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2008 - AudioFile