Booth Tarkington

Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington), 1869-1946, American author, b. Indianapolis. His most characteristic and popular works were his genial novels of life in small Middle Western towns, including The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), The Conquest of Canaan (1905), and the trilogy Growth (1927), made up of Turmoil (1915), The Magnificent Ambersons (1918; Pulitzer Prize), and The Midlander (1923). Alice Adams (1921; Pulitzer Prize), considered by some his best novel, tells of the frustrated ambitions of a romantic lower-middle-class girl. He wrote several amusing novels of boyhood and adolescence, the most notable being Penrod (1914) and Seventeen (1916). His plays include a dramatization of his own historical romance Monsieur Beaucaire (1901) and Clarence (1921).

Bibliography: See his reminiscences, The World Does Move (1928); biography by J. L. Woodress (1955, repr. 1969); study by K. J. Fennimore (1974).

Tarkington, [Newton] Booth (1869–1946), playwright. The famed Indiana novelist first achieved theatrical success when he dramatized his novel Monsieur Beaucaire (often known simply as Beaucaire) with Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland in 1901. With Harry Leon Wilson he wrote The Man from Home (1908) and Cameo Kirby (1909), and for Otis Skinner he wrote Mister Antonio (1916). Tarkington's other collaborations included The Country Cousin (1917) and Tweedles (1923), while on his own he penned Clarence (1919), Intimate Strangers (1921), and Colonel Satan (1931). Several of his novels were dramatized by others, including Seventeen (1918), Penrod (1918), and The Plutocrat (1930). Tarkington was much admired for his warm, homey humor, but like his novels, there was an underlying melancholy present as well. Biography: Gentleman from Indiana, J. Woodress, 1955.