“Major Amberson had ‘made a fortune’ in 1873, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then.”
A stately American novel if there ever was one, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) won the second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, then called the “Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.” In his day, Tarkington was considered among the best novelists of his generation –an erudite midwestern gentleman who dined with business magnates and politicians alike– but today he his reputation seems to have been mostly forgotten. Originally hailing from Indianapolis (where many of his novels were set), Newton Booth Tarkington was a degree-less Princeton man whose upper-crust patrician Hoosier family tragically lost much of its wealth during the Panic of 1893 –a tragedy not unlike the crisis facing the fictional Amberson family in The Magnificent Ambersons. Tarkington was married twice and had one daughter who sadly died at a young age. In his later years, he became a sailor and, as a result of his literary successes, he was often celebrated as the toast of East Coast literary circles, rubbing shoulders with high society everywhere he went. To this day, Booth Tarkington remains one of only a handful of writers to ever win the Pulitzer Prize two separate times (amazingly, he won it again for Alice Adams in 1922). With two Pulitzer Prizes under his hat, Tarkington became the first member of an exclusive club of writers which, in later years, also would also include William Faulkner and John Updike, both of whom also won two Pulitzer Prizes (and as of 2020 Colson Whitehead has also achieved this rare distinction).
With autobiographical echoes of Booth Tarkington’s own life, The Magnificent Ambersons delivers the ruinous story of a once-prominent Midwestern family. The beginning of the novel bestows upon readers a nostalgic glimpse of yesteryear –we are treated to the sentimental panorama of life in a small midland town at the turn of the century. Here, we see children playing in the streets, women gossiping on warm summer nights, and teenagers wooing their neighbor’s daughters while courtly carriages gently trot by. At the center of this blissful epoch is the Amberson family, whose Gilded Age fortune had built this little town. Streets and buildings all bear the Amberson name, and the fabulous Amberson mansion sits at the far end of town. All seems well in this ante-mobilian Arcadia. However, with the passing of an older generation comes a newfound sense of urgency and a desire for growth –enter the rise of urbanization and industrialism. Rather quickly, this little Midwestern town quietly expands into an economic hub and new technologies, like the automobile, begin to accelerate the pace of life. Suddenly, the prestige of the Amberson family starts to wane, and those people who stubbornly stick to the old ways of life quickly fall behind, complacent in their own hubris.
In the middle of the Amberson family’s steady decline is a spoiled and arrogant child named George or “Georgie” Amberson Minafer. He is a “pampered youth” (in fact, a silent film was later released in 1925 loosely based on The Magnificent Ambersons entitled Pampered Youth). As George grows, he inherits the role of de facto head of the Amberson family, but all the while he remains a troubled child. In his own fatal obstinance, he refuses to tame his pride and change with the times. In particular, he despises the newfangled automobile, and arrogantly rejects an opportunity to invest his family’s wealth in this strange new technology. He feels unthreatened and calloused toward the whims of the world around him. George’s judgment is clouded by his own hubris. In his defiant rejectionism of all things new, he also prevents his mother from finding new love after the death of George’s father, despite her obvious infatuation for a local automobile magnate named Mr. Eugene Morgan. At the same time, George also quietly loses track of his own boyhood love interest, Lucy Morgan (Eugene Morgan’s daughter). And in an effort to escape the mounting troubles at home, George travels abroad with his mother, in part, to keep her separated from Eugene Morgan, but while traveling together, George’s mother suddenly falls gravely ill. Together, they return home and she dies shortly thereafter. We are then left to mourn the life she might have lived together with Eugene had George not foolishly ruined their prospects. And suddenly, upon the passing of his mother, George begins to see the world anew –he realizes that his town has truly changed and that his family has become an anachronism, no longer possessing the power it once held.
The Amberson family wealth now lies in ruins. Their investments have sunk and they are forced to sell their fabulous mansion at the far end of town. In time, the old house becomes a dilapidated edifice of old memories and it is soon forgotten until it is boarded up and torn down to make way for the plethora of new storehouses and manufacturing facilities. George and his Aunt Fanny then move into a small apartment together where George is forced to seek employment (he is no longer a “pampered youth”). He finds a dangerous job handling and transporting chemicals in order to pay the monthly rent. By now, the Amberson name has been entirely wiped away from the city’s street signs and buildings. One day, George is struck by an automobile –the very machine he once refused for an investment. The injury breaks both his legs and costs him his job. While the accident is briefly highlighted in the newspapers, both George and the Amberson family name have all been largely forgotten by now. He lies injured and anonymous in an ordinary hospital bed, having seemingly lost everything. Whereas at the beginning of the novel, young Georgie was known as a hell-raiser and a child many hoped would one day receive his comeuppance; now, in the end, George’s curse has finally come full circle –only no one is around to witness it, save for Lucy and her father Eugene who decide to visit George in the hospital in order to make amends.
Throughout the novel, George Amberson Minafer is a frustratingly predictable and one-dimensional character. He is both prideful, and sensitive –incapable of behaving like a gentleman, with all the grace and charm his family desires of him. At the beginning of the novel, he faces scorn by people in town for his wild and reckless behavior. But as he grows, his arrogance prevents him from embracing and investing wisely –his old aristocratic pride is trampled in the end by the inevitable march of progress. In this way, Tarkington’s novel reflects a conservative tone –it is cautionary, warning us of the unstoppable progress of technology. For Tarkington, those with foresight will be forced to embrace what may come, unless they wish to end up like George Amberson. In some respects, The Magnificent Ambersons is a moralistic novel that advises us to avoid complacency. And thus, it lacks a degree of complexity which is present in other, more reputable Pulitzer Prize winners, though The Magnificent Ambersons does touch upon one of the great themes in American literature –that of economic anxiety. According to critic W.J. Stuckey in his book entitled The Pulitzer Prize Novels, the consistent theme in The Magnificent Ambersons is that “honest work will be rewarded by success.”
In all, The Magnificent Ambersons is not a particularly outstanding novel in my view. Admittedly, the opening pages are pure joy as we enter into the nostalgic gaiety of a turn-of-the-century Midwestern town. However, we are soon burdened by the sheer gravitas of George Amberson and his frustratingly poor decisions and his family’s collapsing lifestyle. The Magnificent Ambersons employs a heavy dose of tragic pity (as well as a dash of schadenfreude) coupled with an Aesopian moral, as if to remind us that “pride goeth before a fall.” Perhaps the image of a disappearing small town as it is swallowed up by a big city, along with the downfall of a once prominent family, has now become a tired cliché. Tarkington bathes himself in a pool of austere old world tragedy while avoiding any coup d’œil of good old American optimism. For this reason, The Magnificent Ambersons seems ill-suited to rank among the best of American literary endeavors in my view, though Orson Welles’s truly “magnificent” cinematic interpretation of the novel is not to be missed.
Notable Quotations
“The magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. In that town in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet and everybody knew everybody else’s family horse and carriage. The only public conveyance was the streetcar. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her, while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the “girl” what to have for dinner and came forth from the house. Too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.”
“‘I’m not sure he’s wrong about automobiles,’ he said. ‘With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization –that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men’s souls.'”
“‘…at twenty-one or twenty-two so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can’t tell twenty about this; that’s the pity of it! Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty.'”
“The idealists planned and strove and shouted that their city should become a better, better, and better city—and what they meant, when they used the word “better,” was “more prosperous,” and the core of their idealism was this: “The more prosperous my beloved city, the more prosperous beloved I!” They had one supreme theory: that the perfect beauty and happiness of cities and of human life was to be brought about by more factories; they had a mania for factories; there was nothing they would not do to cajole a factory away from another city; and they were never more piteously embittered than when another city cajoled one away from them.”
The 1919 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The same Novel Jury convened in 1919 as in 1918. It consisted of Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale University, Robert Grant (a Boston novelist), and William Morton Payne (the former literary editor of The Chicago Daily News). The initial consensus was not to select a novel for the year 1919 –the jury twice notified Pulitzer Prize Administator Frank Fackenthal that they could not decide upon a winner– but at the last moment Professor Phelps shot off a telegram to Fackenthal asking if it was too late to give the award to The Magnificent Ambersons (Robert Grant was willing to go along with idea since it was better than nothing at all). The jury collectively decided it was best to hand the prize to Tarkington, though it was with some reluctance –not exactly a resounding endorsement of The Magnificent Ambersons, but it won anyway.
- William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943) or “Billy Phelps” was a celebrated, long-serving professor of English at Yale University for more than four decades. He wrote over twenty books and even late into his career, he maintained a busy schedule of lecturing and touring, as well as publishing a syndicated column and a radio show. Throughout his tenure at Yale, he taught courses on the classics like Shakespeare and Tennyson, as well as modern novelists like Sinclair Lewis and Joseph Conrad. He served on the boards of numerous cultural institutions as detailed in his obituary in The New York Times in 1943. He was married but never had any children.
- Robert Grant (1852-1940) was a Boston-based novelist who was also a probate court judge (1893-1923) and an Overseer of Harvard University (1896-1921). He was called out of retirement in his later years by the Governor of Massachusetts to serve on a special Advisory Committee with President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard and President Samuel Wesley Stratton of MIT to review the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti to determine whether the trial had been fairly conducted.
- William Morton Payne (1858-1919) was the literary editor of the Chicago Morning News (1884–1888) and the Chicago Evening Journal (1888–1892). He also wrote for The Dial, The Forum, The Bookman, Harper’s Weekly, The Atlantic Monthly, Music, The New England Magazine, and The International Monthly. Previously, he was an assistant librarian for the Chicago Public Library, and a high school instructor. Between 1900 and 1904 he lectured on English literature at universities in Wisconsin, Kansas, and Chicago. He died in 1919, in the same year he served on the Pulitzer Jury which selected The Magnificent Ambersons.
Elsewhere across the arts-focused Pulitzer Prizes this year, one of the great American autobiographies won in the Biography category: Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams. And in the Poetry category, both Carl Sandburg and Margaret Widdemer proved victorious.
Who Is Booth Tarkington?
Newton Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) was born in Indianapolis, the second child of John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth. His father was a thirty-seven-year-old attorney who had been the Indiana Governor’s private secretary, a judge for the Fifth Circuit Court, and held office in the state’s House of Representatives. He had helped to organize and serve as captain in the 132nd Indiana Volunteers during the Civil War. Booth’s paternal grandfather was a Methodist minister who migrated northward from Tennessee, and on his mother’s side, he could trace his roots to Thomas Hooker, who founded the colony of Connecticut. his uncle, Newton Booth, for whom Tarkington was named, was the governor of California and later served as a senator for the state. Suffice it to say, Booth Tarkington was the beneficiary of a well-established family. In 1892, his namesake uncle, Newton Booth, died and left Tarkington a modest inheritance which would later help secure a measure of financial stability for the young novelist. Indeed, economic anxiety and social mobility are often recurring themes that appear throughout Tarkington’s novels (earlier in his life, the financial Panic of 1873 wiped out much of the family’s wealth).
He attended Phillip Exeter Academy where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of President Benjamin Harrison. He began his career contributing numerous anonymously submitted stories to various publications. While attending Princeton, he drew comics for the Princeton Tiger and served as a leader at several student organizations. After being rejected numerous times for his literary endeavors, he finally found success with the publication of his first novel “The Gentleman from Indiana” (1889), thanks to a family connection with S.S. McClure, and from here Tarkington embarked on a busy writing career which included the publishing of a new novel each year. He was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives in 1902-1903 but soon returned to writing, penning some forty novels and plays between 1899-1946. His debut novel was The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), and this was followed by Monsieur Beaucaire (1900) which later became an operetta. Several novels later, The Two Vanrevels (1902) was his first book –as far as I can tell– to be featured on the annual Publishers Weekly bestsellers list. Tarkington was most fondly remembered in his day for his tales of Midwestern boyhood as found in his Penrod tales —Penrod (1914), Penrod and Sam (1916), and Penrod Jashber (1929). At the same time, he also wrote a loose trilogy known as the “Growth” trilogy which included The Turmoil (1915), The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), and The Midlander (1923). Both The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams won the Pulitzer Prize (Tarkington is one of only four writers to date who have written two novels that have won a Pulitzer Prize),
Politically, Tarkington was an ardent internationalist, a passionate supporter of the United Nations and Roosevelt’s lend-lease policy, however he staunchly detested FDR’s New Deal and quietly avoided political engagements through the 1930s while prospering, himself, through the Great Depression. His political conservatism can be found starkly expressed throughout his writings as well as his taste in art. He was a defender of the old guard Midwestern aristocracy, an elite class he believed was ever under threat of destruction by the march of progress. He frequently enforced his views when serving on public boards, such as his tenure on the board of the Herron Art Institute.
Tarkington wrote only in longhand, never having learned to use a typewriter. He was a frequent world traveler, residing at homes located along the coast of Maine as well as in Indiana. He was twice married. His first wife, Laurel Louisa Fletcher (later Connely), was a poet who helped arrange many of his early works (they were married from 1902-1911). She was the daughter of a Midwest banking family and a graduate of Smith College. They had one daughter together, Laurel (1906-1923), born in Rome during one of the Tarkington’s extended trips aboard. She tragically suffered from schizophrenia and attempted suicide by casting herself out a second story window. She survived the fall but passed away due to pneumonia at age 17 with her doting father seated at her bedside.
After divorcing his first wife, Tarkington was remarried to Susanah Keifer Robinson in 1912 (they met at a house party in Dayton, Ohio in 1912). They had no children. Tarkington died at the age of 76 in 1946, and despite being nearly blind, he was three-quarters of the way through a new novel at the time, later posthumously published as The Show Piece (1947). During his lifetime, Tarkington was regarded as among the greatest of American novelists, hailed as the great Hoosier writer, the bard of the Midwest, in 1922 Literary Digest named him the greatest living American author, The New York Times ran a poll that ranked Tarkington as one of ten great Americans, however his reputation has since declined precipitously. In 1983, Tarkington’s grandniece Susanah Mayberry published an affectionate memoir of her grand-uncle entitled “My Amiable Uncle” which fondly reflected on his life and career, but more recent reflections on Tarkington’s life have been less friendly. Occasionally, Tarkington’s name appears in contemporary articles –for example, Thomas Mallon penned a scathing article in The Atlantic in 2004 entitled “Hoosiers: The Lost World of Booth Tarkington” and Robert Gottlieb wrote an even more blistering critique of Tarkington in a 2013 The New Yorker article entitled “The Rise and Fall of Booth Tarkington” in which Gottlieb remarked “the candidate for the Great American Novelist had dwindled into America’s most distinguished hack.”
Film Adaptation
- The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
- Director: Orson Welles
- Studio: RKO Studio Pictures
- Starring: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead
Click here to read my review of Orson Welles’s film adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).
Further Reading:
- Penrod Series (1914-1929)
- Growth Trilogy:
- The Turmoil (1915)
- The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)
- The Midlander (1923), re-titled “National Avenue” in 1927
- Alice Adams (1921)
- Booth Tarkington’s other Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Publisher’s Note:
The Magnificent Ambersons was originally published by Doubleday –a leading American publishing house founded as the Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897. By 1947, it had grown into the largest publisher in the United States. But by 2009, in the wake of the Great Recession, Doubleday was forced to merge with Knopf Publishing Group to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is now an imprint at Penguin Random House (it is no longer itself an independent publisher).
Literary Context in 1918-1919:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1918): not awarded.
- The Telemachy section of James Joyce’s Ulysses was published in serialized form in the U.S. journal The Little Review.
- The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (d. 1889) were published via Robert Bridges in 1918. Few of these poems were ever published during Hopkins’ lifetime.
- English writer May Sinclair introduced the term “Stream of consciousness” to describe a uniquely new narrative mode.
- Willa Cather published her masterpiece My Ántonia.
- Edith Wharton published a war novella entitled The Marne.
- According to Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestseller in 1918 was Zen Grey’s The Roaring U.P. Trail, a Western novel. Unlike many of his other novels, Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons was not featured as a bestseller.
- Celebrated World War I English poet Wilfred Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918 a week before the war’s end, at the age of 25. He had been greatly influenced by fellow English war poet Siegfried Sassoon.
- English art critic Robbie Ross, literary executor for Oscar Wilde, suddenly died in 1918. He was openly homosexual and thus faced the full wrath and scorn of his country during his lifetime.
Did The Right Book Win?
Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons is surely not among the worst of the Pulitzer Prize-winners, but neither is it among the best in my view. As a great admirer of Willa Cather’s novels, if I had been given the privilege of serving on the Novel Jury in 1919, I undoubtedly would have selected Willa Cather’s My Ántonia for the prize (feel free to read my reflections on Willa Cather’s My Ántonia here). Still, I appreciated the opportunity to read Booth Tarkington as part of my pilgrimage through the Pulitzer Prize winners. Tarkington is an author I likely would have skipped altogether if not for his two Pulitzer Prize victories.
Tarkington, Booth. The Magnificent Ambersons. Barnes & Noble Classics Series, July 1, 2005.
Click here to read my review of Booth Tarkington’s other Pulitzer Prize winner: Alice Adams.
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