Booth Tarkington

American · 1869 to 1946

Newton Booth Tarkington was born on July 29, 1869, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and named for his uncle Newton Booth, a governor and United States senator of California. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, spent two years at Purdue University, and studied at Princeton, where he was voted the most popular man in his class of 1893 yet left without a degree, having missed a single course in classics. His first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana, found an audience in 1899, and over the next two decades he became one of the most widely read novelists in America, with Penrod in 1914 and Seventeen in 1916 selling in the hundreds of thousands and then the millions. The Magnificent Ambersons, the middle book of his Growth trilogy about a fictional Midwestern city transformed by the automobile age, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1919; Alice Adams won him a second Pulitzer in 1922, a feat only a small handful of American novelists have matched since. He was also a prolific playwright and served briefly in the Indiana House of Representatives. In 1930 he went completely blind after years of failing eyesight; five operations over the following year restored partial sight, and he kept working by dictating his later novels aloud to a secretary rather than writing them by hand. He spent his winters at the family home on North Meridian Street in Indianapolis and his summers sailing out of Kennebunkport, Maine, where he owned a schooner named Regina. Though he was called America's greatest living author in his own lifetime, his reputation faded quickly after his death, and by the century's end he had all but disappeared from the standard histories of American literature. He died in Indianapolis, the city of his birth, on May 19, 1946, at the age of seventy-six.