Tarkington dominated American letters in the first third of the 20th century. His novels headed the newly invented bestseller lists. He won the Pulitzer Prize for literature twice in four years, 1919 and 1922. His books were brought to Broadway and made into movies.
And now? Now Tarkington is forgotten, dismissed, dusted. Even his biography seems out of print.
None of this would be very interesting or consequential if Tarkington were some potboiling hack or purely commercial writer. But at his best, he’s really pretty good - and Alice Adams is Tarkington at his very best.
…
Alice Adams is the sort of book that you’d think would appeal to intelligent young women struggling for self-understanding.
And once upon a time … it did. … But how many women who have turned 20 since the middle years of the last century still read it?
Tarkington is no Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald or Dos Passos. But he’s a much better writer than … well shall we fill out the list? So why is there room for Zora Neale Hurston and John Steinbeck in our high school reading lists, and not Tarkington?
I’ll hazard some guesses:
1) Although he was born in 1869, a quarter century after Henry James (and only two years before Theodorse Dreiser), Tarkington was almost entirely untouched by literary modernism. … Those who did not adopt the new forms and purposes were brutally excised from literary respectability by the critics of the 1930s and 1940s.
2) The keepers of the canon can sometimes forgive a non-modernist style, so long as the writer adopts an alienated, critical or anyway outsider perspective on American life: Think Sinclair Lewis for example, or John Cheever. Tarkington, however, wrote as an “insider.” … The most admirable character of The Mangificent Ambersons [sic] is a successful businessman. Alice Adams finds redemption when she decides to accept her place in life, learn bookkeeping and get a job.
3) The modern university curriculum – and that is the first step to defining the canon – cannot cope with a writer whose views on race fall any distance short of perfect enlightenment. Tarkington was no bigot, and indeed he skewers Alice for her lady-of-the-manor high-handedness toward those African-Americans who come into her ambit. … On the other hand, Tarkington is certainly willing to use racial stereotypes for comic purposes, as he does in the catastrophic dinner party scene that destroys the last of the Adams family’s illusions and deceptions.
4) Tarkington, twice married and a father, was very conversant with the facts of life. … But that’s as far as it goes. To the following generation, this restraint must have seemed an offensive Victorian relic – and Tarkington a perfect target for the mood that Evelyn Waugh would dub horror Victorianus.
5) Tarkington chronicled the society and culture of the towns and cities of the Midwest. Unfortunately for him, that society and culture ended the loser in the culture wars of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. … What artist would think that way again after 1932? Maybe Louis Auchincloss – but he writes about a much grander level of society, and always in the past tense.
But here is one explanation that will not wash: Booth Tarkington has not been forgotten because his (best) work lacks merit.
I bought and reread for no reason that I remember Booth Tarkington’s classics a few summers ago, and read them over a year, and David he was a real artist, evyerthing you say of him was true. I would add to your reasons the canon ignores him:
1, he was normal, and 2, his interest in the facts, mores, and actual building of America in his time suggests a level of preoccupation that suggests…he actually loved it. Bad Booth Tarkington!
You know I read only one Tarkington as a kid, and it wasn’t Alice Adams or The Magnificent Andersons [sic]. It was some small obscure book of his, but I was 12, and a close reading confirmed my suspicions as to the existence of something they were calling the facts of life. He was good on men and women!
I’ll put my own plug in for Tarkington, one of the great American authors. … Among my top 25 books of all time is Penrod, the story of a boy growing up in a small Midwestern town in the early 20th century. It is not only the funniest, but among the most insightful books on the human condition ever written. It is one part rumination on boyhood and one part philosophy of life. The book once held a prominent place on young adult readings lists, but has since, like all his other books, been buried by the sands of time. … Tarkington deserves a renaissance. Penrod, and its sequels Penrod and Sam and Penrod Jashber, are among those few books that my family reads over and over again. I hope Frum keeps beating the drums so that others can experience the sheer delight in these books offer.
What a great conversation.
