1925 Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) is a famous novelist whose actual name is everywhere forgotten. Echoes of his grandiloquent prose (in Orson Welles’s fruity baritone) have – via a classic film adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons – kept his work, if not its author, fresh and alive while contemporaries like Winston Churchill (the other one, the American who wrote novels) – judged greater in their time – have faded utterly.
Booth Tarkington was Indiana-born (a ‘Hoosier’) and a lifelong booster of the region, particularly his native Indianapolis. It changed during Tarkington’s lifetime from quiet rural town to an industrial powerhouse (this is the background to George Minafer’s ‘comeuppance’, and his family’s decay, in the last scenes of The Magnificent Ambersons). Tarkington’s first novel – not his best, but his most characteristic – was The Gentleman from Indiana (1919). His pedigree was locally ‘magnificent’ – like the Ambersons, the Tarkingtons were among Indianapolis’s ‘top 500’. Booth’s middle name (Newton) honoured an uncle, then governor of California. His father was a lawyer (later a judge).
Tarkington attended Princeton, where he enjoyed king-of-the-campus success. He was voted most popular man in his 1893 class. A fellow student recalled him as ‘the only Princeton man who had ever been known to play poker (with his left hand), write a story for the Nassau Lit (with his right hand), and lead the singing in a crowded room, performing these three acts simultaneously’. Such ambidexterity rarely makes for academic magnificence. Tarkington did not graduate (although in the years of his fame Princeton would award him two honorary degrees).
Tarkington tried public life, unsuccessfully. He was, for one term in 1902, an Indiana State Representative in the Indiana government. He married twice. The only child from his marriages died early – nonetheless, the vicissitudes of childhood would be a principal theme in his best-known and bestselling fiction.
Tarkington had his first bestseller with Monsieur Beaucaire (1900), a ‘no man is a hero to his valet’ spoof on the current American rage for historical fiction. Tarkington had even greater success with his comic epics about the trials of youth. Adolescence was a psycho-genetic category invented in America at this period by G. Stanley Hall. Tarkington popularised it in Penrod (1914). Penrod Schofield – invariably accompanied by his dog Duke; and latterly by his gang, Sam Williams, Maurice Levy, Georgie Bassett, and Herman (the second Jewish and the last black) – is an eleven-year-old rebel against the middle-class values of his Midwest family and community. His little battles are narrated in arch-ironic style by Tarkington.
Penrod clearly draws on Tom Sawyer and just as clearly inspired Richmal Crompton’s Just William (1922). Addressed principally to adult readers, both depictions of juvenile machismo exude tolerant adult amusement at the barbarism of the young male child in Western civilisation. Penrod inspired the sequels Penrod and Sam (1916) and Penrod Jashber (1929).
Tarkington continued this bestselling vein with Seventeen (1916). With eighteen-year-olds (and, after 1917, American boys) dying by the hundred thousand in France in 1914–18, Tarkington’s idylls offered escape to a safer, if imaginary, world. Adolescence agonistes of a more tragic kind is portrayed in Georgie Minafer of The Magnificent Ambersons (1923). This novel made up a trilogy with The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1923). These socially troubled novels earned Tarkington two Pulitzers and a front page on Time magazine on this day in 1925. Like everyone else, the young Orson Welles read them admiringly.
Around this period Tarkington was losing his sight, and his later novels – none of which enjoyed the success of the earlier – were dictated. Royalties and film rights (his work adapted smoothly onto the screen) enriched him and allowed him to indulge a taste for English 18th-century painting and fine furniture for his mansion in Indianapolis.
Tarkington was increasingly right-wing in later years, conceiving a violent distaste for President Roosevelt, the New Deal, and virtually everything that happened after 1929 (not least to his beloved Indianapolis).