Word: tarkingtons
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Died. Julian Street, 67, novelist (Rita Coventry) and short-story writer, epicure (Where Paris Dines), close friend and collaborator (Country Cousin) of the late Booth Tarkington; of a cerebral hemorrhage; in Lakeville, Conn...
...sentimentality was not to be confused with his tenderness; Tarkington's affection for Penrod and Willy Baxter, for Alice Adams and Claire Ambler and all his young people, gave life to his novels. Sentimentality is itself a confusion, a failure to discriminate in feeling; and Tarkington even at his best failed in that way. Nothing in Alice Adams is more pathetic than the author's own willingness to let the Adams family be salvaged by a golden-hearted businessman and Alice herself by gallant enrollment in a business college. One such piece of symbolism might pass...
...Tarkington's touchstones, in fact, were always a set of innocent values which he conceived to be "true blue American." In Alice Adams he matched his gifts against new and younger writers who questioned those values. Winesburg, Ohio, had been published in 1919; Main Street had been published in 1920, so had This Side of Paradise. The jazz age-which was also a self-critical and troubled age-had begun. But Booth Tarkington was 51. After his young success with costume romance (Monsieur Beaucaire) and carefree playwriting abroad with Harry Leon Wilson (The Man from Home), he had gone...
...Schofield would not have felt impelled to) on the blessings of being "a good American citizen living up to his highest principles in a good American community." That kind of thing would be enough to rejoice the shade of George Horace Lorimer, from whose Saturday Evening Post Tarkington earned riches for years. But it is not "investigatory" of anything that had not been investigated before and better...
...popular professional, Booth Tarkington belonged, with his friend Harry Leon Wilson, and Joseph Hergesheimer and a few others, to a class whose flair and craftsmanship in the 'teens and '20s of this century is worth another look, though serious critics have generally ignored them. Their trade was to please the public for a living. But while they worked the mine of the U.S.'s more comfortable legends about itself, they worked it sometimes with real honesty and beauty. The literary data on life in the U.S. since 1900 would be as incomplete without Penrod and Alice Adams...