Ayisha Synnestvedt, who adapted the play, describes herself as “a big Tarkington fan” who’d very much like to see a resurgence in Tarkington’s popularity–very much my own motivation for adapting Beasley’s Christmas Party a few years ago. She describes her adaptation of Seventeen as “very faithful to the book, with a few amputations for length and PCness that don’t take away from the spirit of it.”

Well, C.W. Munger has done for Tarkington and Beasley’s Christmas Party what I hoped to do… and obviously failed to: popularize Tarkington’s quaint and poignant holiday novella as a stage play. After a successful off-Broadway premiere and run two years ago, and in the wake of successful remounting in other markets last year, the play will make its debut this coming Christmas… in my very own back yard.

Carmel, Indiana’s Center for the Performing Arts is gearing up for a gala “Opening Night Celebration” featuring David Hyde Pierce of Frasier fame, Saturday, August 6 at 5:30 pm. Ticket prices range from a single-seat “Bronze Package,” at $150, which includes “show, post-show wrap party, and perimeter seat locations in the Tarkington for the Opening Night show,” all the way up to a 12-ticket $10,000 “Founder’s Package.”

In the “I can’t believe I’m actually reporting this” category… In my Google news alert for “Booth Tarkington” came this amazing tweet a while back: “I’m at Booth Tarkington Rest Area Westbound (Mile Marker 146 Indiana East–West Toll Road, IN-120, Fremont).” The Tweet referenced a foursquare meetup. Okay. So that’s weird enough. But this is where my own weirdness set in.

Last year, thanks to the inevitability of technology and the inexorable drive of the free market, The Wren is now available in facsimile edition. Who knows why, but someone finally got the notion that putting this public-domain work back in print would be a great idea. And who knows? Maybe it is. For a serious collector, though, like me, simply reading it will not be enough. I finally managed to track down a copy of the original 1922 Samuel French edition on ABE Books.

Late last month, Indiana University’s student newspaper, the Daily Student, reported that three I.U. professors were among “180 recipients of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 2011.” One of the three was George Hutchinson, I.U.’s Booth Tarkington professor of literary studies. “I’m working on a book on American literature and culture in the 1940s, which is a remarkably neglected period in American literary history,” he said.

Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas this week staged a pair of student plays in a program the drama department refers to as “the annual spring Acts of Consequence.” The set of one-act dramas played Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and first on the bill was Tarkington’s “Little Theater” piece The Trysting Place. “Directed by SC senior Lenita Krejci, a theater-education major from Enid, Okla., the play is a project for her Directing II class. Southwestern’s theater-education program provides the opportunity for theater-education majors to build their skills in directing by directing a one-act in the second semester.”

After Conquest of Canaan, Tarkington then took a long break from provincial melodramatic novels; but by the time he returned with Ramsey Milholland, The Turmoil, The Midlander, Alice Adams, and The Magnificent Ambersons, his setting was no longer Indiana per se—but, more broadly, Middle America, and an industrialized heartland at that. And the thrust of those novels: not rising, but implosion.

In addition to its share of Tarkington’s voluminous papers (Princeton, among other places boasts the lion’s share), The Indiana Historical Society also has two collections of his second wife’s papers: her letters, and her Papers, 1898-1932. The biographical comments in the full record of “Papers” are illuminating.

In 2010, Indiana’s Butler University was “pleased to announce the inauguration of the Booth Tarkington Writer-in-Residence, a program designed to bring exciting emerging writers to the program as guest faculty.” Faculty member Robert Stapleton mentions that, “for this position, we’re creating an office with Tarkington’s actual desk.” And in November, the University received a $1 million gift to establish a new “Center for Creative Writing” to house and nurture writers and students in the MFA program. The first appointment as Tarkington Writer-in-Residence, last September, was made to award-winning writer Michael Dahlie.