Booth Tarkington | |
|---|---|
 Tarkington in 1922 | |
| Born | Newton Booth Tarkington (1869-07-29)July 29, 1869 Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
| Died | May 19, 1946(1946-05-19) (aged 76) Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
| Resting place | Crown Hill Cemetery and Arboretum, Section 13, Lot 5639°49′08″N86°10′33″W / 39.8188341°N 86.1757734°W /39.8188341; -86.1757734 |
| Occupation | Novelist, dramatist |
| Education | Purdue University Princeton University |
| Years active | 1899–1946 |
| Notable works |
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| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1919, 1922) |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 1 |
| Signature | |
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Newton Booth Tarkington (July 29, 1869 – May 19, 1946) was an Americannovelist anddramatist best known for his novelsThe Magnificent Ambersons (1918) andAlice Adams (1921). He is one of only four novelists to win thePulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along withWilliam Faulkner,John Updike, andColson 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 withMeredith Nicholson,George Ade, andJames Whitcomb Riley helped to create aGolden Age of literature in Indiana.
Booth Tarkington served one term in theIndiana House of Representatives, was critical of the advent of automobiles, and set many of his stories in the Midwest. He eventually moved toKennebunkport, Maine, where he continued his life work even as he suffered a loss of vision.[2]
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.
Tarkington was born inIndianapolis, Indiana, on July 29, 1869,[3] the son of John S. Tarkington, a judge,[4] and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. He came from apatricianMidwestern family that had lost much of its wealth after thePanic of 1873.[citation needed] Tarkington was named after his maternal uncleNewton Booth, then the governor ofCalifornia. He was also related toChicago MayorJames Hutchinson Woodworth through Woodworth's wife, Almyra Booth Woodworth.[citation needed]
Tarkington attendedShortridge High School in Indianapolis, and completed his secondary education atPhillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire, near the East Coast.[5] He attendedPurdue University for two years, where he was a member of theSigma 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 toPrinceton University. At Princeton, Tarkington is said to have been known as "Tark" among the members of theIvy Club, the first ofPrinceton's historic eating clubs.[6] He had also been in a short-lived eating club called"Ye Plug and Ulster," which becameColonial Club.[7][8] He was active as an actor and served as president of Princeton's Dramatic Association, which later became theTriangle 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 spoofKatherine, 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.[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'sNassau Literary Magazine, known more recently asThe Nassau Lit.[11] While an undergraduate, he socialized withWoodrow Wilson, an associate graduate member of theIvy Club. Wilson returned to Princeton as a member of the political science faculty shortly before Tarkington departed; they maintained contact throughout Wilson's life.[citation needed] Tarkington failed to earn his undergraduateA.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.[citation needed]
Tarkington's first successful novel wasThe Gentleman from Indiana (1899).[4] In 1902–1903, he served one term as aRepublican member of theIndiana 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) andClaire Ambler (1928).[13] He produced both of hisPulitzer 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 toPublishers Weekly book sales data from that period.[13] At one time, hisPenrod series was as well known asHuckleberry Finn byMark 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 andMary's Neck appeared on the annual best-seller lists a total of nine times.[citation needed]
Tarkington authored 25 plays, including three collaborations withHarry Leon Wilson. Some of the plays dramatized his novels.[12] Some were eventually filmed, includingMonsieur Beaucaire,Presenting Lily Mars, andThe 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.
Tarkington was an unabashedMidwesternregionalist and set much of his fiction in his nativeIndiana. His style has been compared to that of Mark Twain andWilliam 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 thenouveau 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 thePulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, in 1919 and 1922, for his novelsThe Magnificent Ambersons[14] andAlice Adams.[15]
Other achievements include:
Tarkington's honorary degrees included an A.M. and a Litt.D. from Princeton, and honorary doctorates fromColumbia University and Purdue. He made substantial donations to Purdue for building an all-men'sresidence 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 (and aunt of 1930s gay Hollywood nightclub performerBruz Fletcher), 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 secretaryElizabeth Trotter.[21] Despite his failing eyesight, between 1928 and 1940 he edited several historical novels by hisKennebunkport,Maine, neighborKenneth Roberts, who described Tarkington as a "co-author" of his later books and dedicated three of them (Rabble in Arms,Northwest Passage, andOliver 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.[22][1]
Tarkington maintained a home in his native Indiana at 4270 NorthMeridian 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, theRegina, 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 nearbyColby College.
Tarkington took a close interest in fine art and collectibles[3] and was a trustee of theJohn 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 inCrown 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 asMark 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 ofTarkington 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 criticThomas 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'santi-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 literaryenvironmentalist—not just a 'conservationist,' in the [Theodore Roosevelt] 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—inThe 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 theModel 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 inThe World Does Move. His important novels are all marked by the soul-killing effects of smoke and asphalt and speed, and even inSeventeen, Willie Baxter fantasizes about winning Miss Pratt by the rescue of precious little Flopit from an automobile's rushing wheels.[28]
In June 2019, theLibrary of America publishedBooth Tarkington: Novels & Stories, collectingThe Magnificent Ambersons,Alice Adams, andIn the Arena: Stories of Political Life.
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Two film musicals were loosely based on thePenrod series,On Moonlight Bay (1951) and its sequel,By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1954), withDoris Day andGordon MacRae.
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