Booth Tarkington

In Penrod and Sam, the imaginative adventures of Tarkington's 10-year-old Penrod Schofield continue. Penrod's sidekick is Samuel Williams, and together they improvise, causing general mischief and disorder wherever they go. In picaresque fashion, a fencing battle takes them all through the neighborhood; they narrowly escape serious injury while making boastful demonstrations with a loaded gun; they indulge in dubious "'nishiation" practices for their secret society; they steal food for the starving horse concealed in the Schofields' empty stable; they attempt to fish a cat out of a cistern using a pair of trousers; and they cause general chaos at Miss Amy Rennsdale's dance. Familiar characters from the earlier Penrod volume—Maurice Levy, Georgie Basset, Roddy Bitts, Herman and Verman, and Marjorie Jones—make their appearance in Penrod and Sam. This is a delightfully nostalgic look at Tarkington's turn-of-the-century Indiana.

In Penrod and Sam, the imaginative adventures of Tarkington's 10-year-old Penrod Schofield continue. Penrod's sidekick is Samuel Williams, and together they improvise, causing general mischief and disorder wherever they go. In picaresque fashion, a fencing battle takes them all through the neighborhood; they narrowly escape serious injury while making boastful demonstrations with a loaded gun; they indulge in dubious "'nishiation" practices for their secret society; they steal food for the starving horse concealed in the Schofields' empty stable; they attempt to fish a cat out of a cistern using a pair of trousers; and they cause general chaos at Miss Amy Rennsdale's dance. Familiar characters from the earlier Penrod volume—Maurice Levy, Georgie Basset, Roddy Bitts, Herman and Verman, and Marjorie Jones—make their appearance in Penrod and Sam. This is a delightfully nostalgic look at Tarkington's turn-of-the-century Indiana.

A familiar midwestern novel in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, The Turmoil was the best-selling novel of 1915. It is set in a small, quiet city--never named but closely resembling the author’s hometown of Indianapolis--that is quickly being transformed into a bustling, money-making nest of competitors more or less overrun by “the worshippers of Bigness.” “There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke,” begins The Turmoil, the first volume of Pulitzer Prize-winner Booth Tarkington’s “Growth” trilogy. A narrative of loss and change, a love story, and a warning about the potential evils of materialism, the book chronicles two midwestern families trying to cope with the onset of industrialization. Tarkington believed that culture could flourish even as the country was increasingly fueled by material progress. The Turmoil, the first great success of his career, tells the intertwined stories of two families: the Sheridans, whose integrity wanes as their wealth increases, and the Vertrees, who remain noble but impoverished. Linked by the romance between a Sheridan son and a Vertrees daughter, the story of the two families provides a dramatic view of what America was like on the verge of a new order. An introduction by Lawrence R. Rodgers places the novel squarely in the social and cultural context of the Progressive Era. The book also features illustrations by C. E. Chambers.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class. Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known through the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but as the critic Stanley Kauffmann noted, "It is high time that [the novel] appear again, to stand outside the force of Welles's genius, confident in its own right." "The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington's best novel," judged Van Wyck Brooks. "[It is] a typical story of an American family and town--the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city. This novel no doubt was a permanent page in the social history of the United States, so admirably conceived and written was the tale of the Amber-sons, their house, their fate and the growth of the community in which they were submerged in the end." Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), a prolific writer who achieved overnight success with his first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), is perhaps best remembered as the author of the popular Penrod adventures and Seventeen (1916). He was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize for the novel Alice Adams (1921).

[FYI: Named one of the 100 Best Novels by the editors of the Modern Library; 7/20/98 New York Times, p. B1] "Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons is a delightful novel. In addition, it is a view of Indianapolis' evolution from a major marketing center to a great industrial city. It adds a new dimension to one's understanding of the coming of the Industrial Age to the State of Indiana." —Herman B Wells, Indiana University "With the tremendous emphasis on wealth and status in contemporary society, Tarkington's observations are as apt today as when first written. But that is what makes a classic, isn't it?" —Library Journal

Penrod's escapades have delighted generations of readers. The stories in this Indiana classic will captivate still another generation of young readers and awaken nostalgia in many an adult.

The description for this book, Dr. Panofsky and Mr. Tarkington: An Exchange of Letters, 1938-1946, will be forthcoming.