Matthiessen accused him of nostalgia, sentimentality, a lack of “reality” (not enough sex and violence in his novels), and a general ignorance of just how reactionary and repressive the American Midwest and middle class really were. In response, influential critics like Carl Van Doren and F.O. Tarkington was happy to identify-and celebrate-the old order’s virtues. Worse, his work was not rooted in the oppositional, revolt-against-the-village mentality championed by younger writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson.
Once modernism began to take hold, Tarkington’s realism seemed just too readable (not to mention saleable) to be truly literary.
Yet by the 1920s Tarkington was falling out of literary favor. By 1933, when Tarkington received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal-previously given only to his hero William Dean Howells and contemporary Edith Wharton-nine of his works had made the top ten in Publisher’s Weekly’s year-end bestseller lists. The following year, Literary Digest called him America’s greatest living author, and the New York Times selected him as one of the ten greatest living Americans, period. In 1921, Publisher’s Weekly named him the country’s most significant author.
The Magnificent Ambersons won Tarkington a Pulitzer in 1919. By the mid-teens he felt called to be this revolution’s literary chronicler.Ĭritical success soon followed. There he watched a remarkable social revolution unfold as new, democratic manners replaced older, aristocratic ones, and new technologies, especially the automobile, transformed the way people related, physically and imaginatively, to time and space. Indianapolis was Tarkington’s primary home and literary inspiration, where he observed a new commercial order, with new families at its vanguard, take root. Then a city of some 50,000, Tarkington would see his hometown grow ten-fold before his death in 1946. Tarkington was born in 1869 to an upper middle-class (but not wealthy) family in Indianapolis. As 2019 is the 150th anniversary of Tarkington’s birth-and the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Magnificent Ambersons, his best-known novel-the timing is apt. That the only author to win two Pulitzer Prizes for his novels had to wait until the timeless works of James Weldon Johnson, Charles Brockden Brown, David Goodis, and May Swenson had been issued says a good deal about literary politics-but at least the wrong has been righted.
After 319 volumes over 40 years the Library of America (LOA) has finally collected three books by Newton Booth Tarkington.
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