The Two Vanrevels

Newton Booth Tarkington (July 29 1869 - May 19 1946) was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. 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. Although he is nearly forgotten today (2020) in the 1910s and 1920s he was considered Americas greatest living author. 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 removed to Kennebunkport Maine where he continued his life work even as he suffered a loss of vision. In the 1910s and 1920s Tarkington was regarded as the great American novelist 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. By the later twentieth century however he was ignored in academia: no congresses no society no journal of Tarkington Studies. In 1985 he was cited as an example of the great discrepancy possible between an authors fame when alive and oblivion later. According to this view if an author succeeds at pleasing his or her contemporaries -- and Tarkingtons works have not a whiff of social criticism -- he or she is not going to please later readers of inevitably different values and concerns. (wikipedia.org)