A Study Guide for Booth Tarkington's "The Magnificent Ambersons"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Booth Tarkington's "The Magnificent Ambersons," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Mar 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535819800

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The Magnificent Ambersons

Booth Tarkington

1918

Introduction

The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) by Booth Tarkington is something of a literary oddity: a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel widely panned by critics; a once well-known novel now virtually forgotten by modern readers; and a book eclipsed in the popular culture by its own trouble-plagued 1942 film adaptation. At the time of its publication, Tarkington was already a best-selling author; with The Magnificent Ambersons, however, he became a literary superstar. He was even chosen in a 1922 Literary Digest contest as the greatest living writer.

The Magnificent Ambersons is the chronicle of a wealthy family's declining fortunes in a growing Midwestern city at the turn of the twentieth century. The tale focuses mainly on George Minafer, a child born into prosperity who has been spoiled by his mother and grandfather. He derides work as something for the lower classes, and runs roughshod over the town citizenry as if it were his inherited right. When the family's wealth begins to run dry, George sees the world he knows slip away.

Although the novel has fallen out of favor with many critics and scholars, it remains a significant depiction of Midwestern city life in the early 1900s, as urbanization spread outward and radically shifted both the psychology and habits of all those it touched. Indeed, many critics—even while faulting the work on a literary level—have acknowledged its value as a detailed document of a bygone facet of American life.

Author Biography

Newton Booth Tarkington was born on July 29, 1869, in Indianapolis, Indiana. The upper-middle-class family in which he was raised was a prestigious one; his father was a lawyer, and the uncle for whom he was named served as both governor and a senator of California. He attended both Purdue and Princeton universities, though he failed to earn a degree at either college. However, he served as editor of the Nassau Literary Magazine while at Princeton, and decided to focus his efforts on a career as a writer.

After he spent several years honing his craft, Tarkington's first novel, The Gentleman from,, was published in 1899. This was followed by a quick succession of other works, interrupted only by a brief career as a congressman for the state of Indiana, with the author averaging about one novel per year. Among these works were Penrod (1914), a popular collection of comical adventures about a Midwestern boy, and The Turmoil (1915), the first of what would become the author's Growth trilogy.

The second novel of the trilogy, The Magnificent Ambersons, proved to be one of the author's greatest successes, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. Like many of his works, it relied heavily upon the author's own experiences growing up in Indianapolis, with the unnamed Midland city serving as a fiction representation of his hometown. This success was followed by another Pulitzer