Booth Tuckington

Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) was a celebrated American novelist and playwright, born Newton Booth Tarkington in Indianapolis, Indiana. Educated at Purdue University and Princeton, he became one of the most popular and commercially successful American writers of the early twentieth century. He remains one of the few novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, receiving the honor for The Magnificent Ambersons (1919) and Alice Adams (1922).

Tarkington's fiction is distinguished by its warm satire of Midwestern middle-class life and its elegiac portrayal of old aristocratic families displaced by industrialization. The Magnificent Ambersons, the centerpiece of his "Growth" trilogy alongside The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1923), was famously adapted into Orson Welles's acclaimed 1942 film. His beloved Penrod (1914) and Seventeen (1916) humorously chronicled American boyhood, while Alice Adams offered a poignant portrait of a small-town woman's social aspirations. Other notable works include his debut novel The Gentleman from Indiana (1899) and the popular novella Monsieur Beaucaire (1900). Tarkington also achieved considerable success on Broadway with plays such as Clarence (1919) and The Man from Home (1907), cementing his reputation as a defining voice of Middle America.