The magnificent ambersons novel5/30/2023 In his later years, he became a sailor, and as a result of his literary successes, he was often celebrated as the toast of East Coast elite circles, rubbing shoulders with high society everywhere he went. Tarkington married twice and had one daughter who sadly died at a young age. Originally hailing from Indianapolis (where his novels were mostly set), Newton Booth Tarkington was a degree-less Princeton man whose upper-crust patrician Midwestern family tragically lost most of its wealth during the Panic of 1893, not unlike the fictional Amberson family. In his day, Tarkington was considered among the best novelists of his generation, an erudite midwestern gentleman who dined with business magnates and politicians alike, but today he has fallen among the crowded ranks of mostly forgotten Pulitzer Prize-winners. With two Pulitzer Prizes, Tarkington became the founding member of an exclusive club which, in later years, also included William Faulkner and John Updike, who both won two Pulitzer Prizes (and as of 2020 Colson Whitehead has also achieved this rare distinction). Its author, Booth Tarkington, is one of the few writers to ever win the Pulitzer twice (amazingly, he won it again for Alice Adams in 1922). A stately American novel if there ever was one, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) won the second “Pulitzer Prize for the Novel” in 1919.
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