She Doesn't Last, Apparently

IT IS NOW over half a century since Alice Adams, pretty, pert and foolish, made her bittersweet way into the 1920'S to win Booth Tarkington a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, his second since the inception of the awards only five years before. Today Tarkington's literary stock has long since plummeted. Two and a half decades after his death he is remembered (if at all) as the author of some juvenile novels presently out of fashion. But the year 1921, when Alice Adams was published, found him at the height of popularity and a wealthy man. Throughout his career, which began in I899, he was famed for his charming costume romances and honored for his genial social portraiture in the manner of W. D. Howells, his chosen model and, among the fashionable circles which for Tarkington counted most, the pre-eminent man of American letters, whose blessing the younger midwestern novelist repeatedly received. By the time Harding's administration ushered in the Republican twenties, Tarkington had published two-thirds of the loose trilogy of novels, Growth, which was designed to secure his place in the American tradition. An ambitious work upon a subject of potentially monumental proportions, Growth was presented over a decade: The Turmoil (1915) was received as a sign of Tarkington's coming into his full powers; The Magnificent Arnbersons (I9I8) was his first Pulitzer Prize novel; and The Midlander (1923) signalled the close of his best period. (By the time the three works were collected into a singlevolume edition-I927, with The Midlander retitled National Avenue -Tarkington had already fallen from favor.) Growth documents the significant history of a representative midwestern American city from the close of the Civil War until after World War I. Tarkington's city, modeled after the author's own Indianapolis, represents an essential chunk of the geography of the American spirit during

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