Booth Tarkington
4 books
- You'll wince through this one in the best way: Alice picking her own violets and inventing a glamorous life for a boy she likes, while her family quietly falls apart around her. It's sad and small-town specific, and that awful hot dinner party scene stays with you.
- This is the quiet, sadder cousin of The Magnificent Ambersons: you follow Dan Oliphant, an unstoppable booster pouring his life into a suburban development while smoke swallows the old avenue and his New York wife despises everything he loves. Slow and melancholy, but the ending earns it.
- You spend most of it wanting to shake George Minafer, this spoiled boy who wrecks his mother's one chance at happiness, and yet Tarkington makes you ache for him as the automobile quietly buries his family's whole world. Sad, sharp, and gentler than you'd expect.
- Bibbs Sheridan, the frail son who'd rather write poetry than worship his father's roaring factories, is easy to root for, and Tarkington makes you feel that smoke-choked boomtown in your lungs. It moves gently and moralizes a bit, but if you like quiet rebels, this lands.