Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington

It’s rare to see a roller coaster ride for a writer to the degree to which Booth Tarkington surged in popularity in his time and fell into relative neglect decades later. Booth is one of the few writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for writing, twice, and not be a steadfast part of the literary canon. Born in 1869, Tarkington attended Princeton and wrote literature and plays profusely. He was a big commercial success in his lifetime and often ranked above Melville and Wharton as an American writer. Reasons for his late 20th century neglect revolve around an overly nostalgic look at a romanticized pre-industrial past, racial stereotypes, and prolific but mediocre output.

Alice Adams (1921) is considered Booth’s best writing, and by some, a masterpiece. We’ll dive right in and form our own opinions on this once incredibly popular and influential American novelist who is off the literary radar today. Alice Adams is a novel of a vain young girl’s desperate efforts to surmount the barriers of small-town provincial snobbery. She comes from a poor family, but meets an aristocrat and falls in love…We’ll leave things here and dive in.

Paperback edition:
https://a.co/d/aUznetr

Alice Adams is available in the public domain on Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/980/pg980.txt