Home > Back to Search Results >
Booth Tarkington...
Booth Tarkington...
Item # 554741
May 03, 1914
The New York Tribune's GOTHAM WEEKLY GAZETTE, New York City, New York, May 3, 1914
* Booth Tarkington
* Uncommon title
This is an uncommon title published "Every Sunday" by the New York Tribune as stated in the dateline.
Mostly has local bits of news, including a pg. 2 item that says: "Booth Tarkington is contemplating to go to the State of Maine the end of the present month. While en route to there he will be a Gotham passer through to inspect the Gazette's new office and everything."
Quarto-size, 4 pages, browning and a bit irregular at the spine.
wikipedia notes: Booth Tarkington was the son of John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington, and named after his maternal uncle Newton Booth, then the governor of California. Tarkington attended Shortridge High School, but his truancy caused his parents to send him to Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school on the East Coast.[1] Tarkington matriculated to Purdue University, attended for two years, and then transferred to Princeton University for another two years of study. He never graduated from either university. He later made substantial donations to Purdue, which the university named Tarkington Hall, an all-men's residence hall, in his honor.[2]
Tarkington was a member of Purdue's Morley Eating Club and Princeton's The Ivy Club. While at Princeton he also edited for the Nassau Literary Magazine and founded the Princeton Triangle Club. He was voted the most popular man in the class of 1893. His later achievements eventually earned him two honorary Princeton degrees, an A.M. in 1899 and a Litt.D. in 1918.
Tarkington was a world traveller who spent much of his later life in Kennebunkport Maine, and left his papers to Colby College. At the same time, he was also an unabashed Midwestern regionalist, and set much of his fiction in his native Indiana. 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.
Tarkington dramatized several of his novels; some were eventually filmed. In 1928, he published a book of reminiscences, The World Does Move. He illustrated the books of others, including a 1933 reprint of Huckleberry Finn, as well as his own. He took a close interest in fine art and collectibles, and was a trustee of the John Herron Art Museum. In 1902, he served in the Indiana House of Representatives, which supplied the experiences for his book In the Arena: Stories of Political Life. He lived at 4270 North Meridan in Indianapolis from 1923 until his death.[1]
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 family that came down in the world after the Panic of 1873. Today he is best known for his novel The Magnificent Ambersons, which Orson Welles filmed in 1942. It is included in the Modern Library's list of top-100 novels. The second volume in Tarkington's Growth trilogy, it contrasted the decline of the "old money" Amberson dynasty against the rise of "new money" industrial tycoons in the years between the Civil War and World War I.
Tarkington divorced his first wife in 1911, and remarried the following year. His only child died young.
Category: The 20th Century
Add to Cart
