In a review of Caroline P Murphy’s Isabella de’Medici for The Observer (UK) this week, Peter Conrad gives Tarkington a huge nod for his literary insight. Right in the second sentence of the review, Conrad notes:

In Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons, the affluent splendour of Renaissance Florence is seen as a prototype for the grandiosity of mercantile New York, with the Medici prince known as Il Magnifico deferring to the magnificence of the Rockefellers and Fricks. A century later, the analogy between epochs still holds good. The Medici Effect, a recent manual for innovatory entrepreneurs written by the founder of a software company, reinterprets the Florentine dynasty as sponsors of cultural change who might, if they were with us today, be ‘making intersectional ideas happen’ or sponsoring a ‘leap in computation’.

It warms my heart when critics perceive Tarkington as still relevant.