Booth Tarkington
1) The Flirt
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Booth Tarkington has an amazingly deft touch with characterization, and the tense relationship between town flirt Cora Madison and her quieter sister Laura is so compelling that the story has been the basis for a number of filmed versions. As with Tarkington's later novel The Magnificent Ambersons, The Flirt is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of a dysfunctional but ultimately loving family.
American novelist Booth Tarkington was a keen observer of the divisions between social classes in the United States, and his stories often focused on those who reigned supreme in the country's halls of power. The collection In the Arena brings together a number of Tarkington's best-known short works that deal with various aspects of the U.S. political process.
Is there something about aesthetic beauty that can soothe the soul of even the most troubled individual? That's the question at the center of Booth Tarkington's eminently entertaining short novel The Beautiful Lady. In the story, a down-on-his-luck Italian who is barely scraping by in Paris has his whole life turned upside down by a chance encounter with the enchanting temptress referred to in the book's title.
Booth Tarkington's wildly successful novel Seventeen satirizes the vagaries of American adolescence. Though 17-year-old protagonist William Sylvanus Baxter is awkward, tactless, and often less than likable, Tarkington's insightful—and hilarious—take on teenage life and love is sure to please readers who appreciate top-notch humor writing.
The maple-bordered street was as still as a country Sunday; so quiet that there seemed an echo to my footsteps. It was four o'clock in the morning; clear October moonlight misted through the thinning foliage to the shadowy sidewalk and lay like a transparent silver fog upon the house of my admiration, as I strode along, returning from my first night's work on the "Wainwright Morning Despatch." I had already marked that house as the...
