Alice Adams: Original and Unabridged - Paperback

by Booth Tarkington (Author)

Alice Adams is the 1921 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington. The narrative centers on the character of a young woman, Alice Adams, who aspires to climb the social ladder and win the affections of a wealthy young man named Arthur Russell. Arthur is an upper-class young man smitten with Alice, who is not entirely aware of the Adams family's status in town. The story is set in a lower-middle-class household in an unnamed town in the Midwest shortly after World War I.

Author Biography

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, with William Faulkner and John Updike, one of only three novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. Tarkington was one of the more popular American novelists of his time. His The Two Vanrevels and Mary's Neck appeared on the annual best-seller lists a total of nine times. The Penrod novels depict a typical upper-middle class American boy of 1910 vintage, revealing a fine, bookish sense of American humor. At one time, his Penrodseries was as well known as Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Much of Tarkington's work consists of satirical and closely observed studies of the American class system and its foibles. He himself came from a patrician Midwestern family that lost much of its wealth after the Panic of 1873. Today, he is best known for his novel The Magnificent Ambersons, which Orson Welles filmed in 1942. The second volume in Tarkington's Growth trilogy, it contrasted the decline of the "old money" Amberson dynasty with the rise of "new money" industrial tycoons in the years between the American Civil War and World War I.