“I would give anything for a bubble bath right now!”but in 1933 the gold medal for fiction
from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, which Edith Wharton and
William Dean Howells had won pre-
viously. As early as 1922, the Times had
placed him twelfth (and the only writer)
on a list of the twelve greatest contem-
porary American men. “Yes, I got in
as last on the Times list,” Tarkington
commented. “What darn silliness! You
can demonstrate who are the 10 fattest
people in a country and who are the
27 tallest ... but you can’t say who are
the 10 greatest with any more author-
ity than you can say who are the 13
damndest fools.”
As for booksellers, in 1921 they voted
him the most significant contempo-
rary American writer. (Wharton came
in second. Robert Frost? Thirteenth.
Theodore Dreiser? Fourteenth. Eu-
gene O’Neill? Twenty-sixth.) Nothing
ever changes. Some forty years earlier,
a comparable poll ranked E. P. Roe
and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth at
Nos. 1 and 2, with scores of votes each.
At the bottom of the list—with two
votes—came Herman Melville.
How to explain this remarkable ca-
reer—the meteoric ascent to fame, the
impregnable reputation over several
decades, and then the pronounced
plunge into obscurity? If you read all
his fiction (which I strongly advise not
attempting), you find a steady if unin-
spired hand at the helm. Slowly, pains-
takingly, Tarkington had taught him-
self to write reliable prose and construct
appealing fictions; he was unpreten-
tious—always literate but never showy.
You could count on him to catch your
interest even if he failed to grip your
imagination or your heart. And he was
always a gentleman.N
ewton Booth Tarkington was born
in Indianapolis in 1869, his father
a prosperous lawyer. But it was his
mother who was the dominant figure
in the family—she and her brother,
Newton Booth, a flourishing merchant
who became the governor of Califor-
nia and then a United States senator.
Another powerful figure in the family
was Tarkington’s sister, Hauté, a de-
cade his senior and a force of nature.
A superficially conventional Mid-
western family, the Tarkingtons didn’t
always behave conventionally. When
young Booth, halfway through highschool, was discovered to have been
playing truant for nine weeks, his par-
ents didn’t remonstrate or punish, they
simply shipped him East to the Phil-
lips Exeter Academy. Back in India-
napolis, he had been a fairly success-
ful student, unathletic and bookish but
also boyish and well liked. (He was al-
ways well liked.) He was fussed over
at home by his adoring mother and
sister, and he was at ease with family
friends like President Benjamin Har-
rison and James Whitcomb Riley—“the
Hoosier Poet”—who was an encour-
aging presence in his life. (Riley had
once paid court to Hauté.) It was a
comfortable world.
Booth thrived at Phillips Exeter,
where the young men (he was eigh-
teen when he arrived there) were more
or less on their own. According to his
biographer James Woodress, “Tarking-
ton fancied himself a gay blade during
his senior year, but his notions of dev-
iltry stopped at practical jokes, loud
clothes, incessant smoking, and occa-
sional champagne suppers. He was
shocked by the sexual license of some
of his classmates.” To a friend back
home, he wrote, “What a hot-bed of
foulness and muck! Portsmouth houses
are full of them every night—Boston
ones, every holiday.” Indiana, Woodress
points out, “was not more saintly than
the East in 1889, but to Tarkington and
his friends in Indianapolis brothels ex-
isted only in books.”
He thrived yet again when he moved
on to Indiana’s Purdue University, in
pursuit of a young woman who hap-
pened to live in Lafayette. But his
mother was determined that he go to
Princeton, and there he went after a
year at Purdue, despite his sense that
it was time for him to start doing some-
thing. At Princeton, he more than
thrived, he blossomed. He was an ed-
itor for three university publications;
he was a star—writing, directing, and
acting—of the Dramatic Association,
which turned into the famous Trian-
gle Club; he was an outstanding solo-
ist in the touring Princeton glee club
(famous for his rendition of Kipling’s
“Danny Deever” set to music). He was
also a prize orator; he was dashing off
derivative verse and sketches; and he
was forever drawing—he thought he
might find a career in art. And he was PREVIOUS PAGE: JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG, “PORTRAIT OF BOOTH TARKINGTON,” 1916. COURTESY INDIANAPOLIS MUSEUM OF ART AT NEWFIELDS