Tarkington, Booth

Biography

Novelist and playwright Booth Tarkington was the younger of two children of lawyer and county judge John Stevenson Tarkington and his wife Elizabeth (Booth) Tarkington. He was christened Newton Booth Tarkington, but early dropped his given first name. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy for his last two years of high school, and at Purdue and Princeton Universities, though he did not achieve a degree from either. Tarkington spent one term in the Indiana state legislature (1902-1903), but his principle ambition and career was as a writer. In 1899 he published his first successful novel, The Gentleman From Indiana, followed in 1900 by Monsieur Beaucaire, a popular historical romance. A prolific writer, Tarkington's books totalled more that forty-five. His greatest public and critical successes were in the years 1914-1924, when he wrote his best-known books: Penrod (1914), Penrod and Sam (1916), Seventeen (1916), and Gentle Julia (1922. His two Pulitzer Prize novels, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921) also date from this time. Tarkington married twice, firstly to Laurel Louisa Fletcher, of Indianapolis, on 18 June 1902. This marriage ended in divorce. He married secondly on 6 June 1912 to the widowed Susannah (Keifer) Robinson. Tarkington's only child, Laurel, was born in 1906 and died of pneumonia at the age of seventeen. [Excerpted from Tarkington's entry in DAB Supplement Four: 815-817]

Bibliography

1933

DAB, Supplement Four (1946-1950): 815-817.

1946

New York Times. 20 May 1946: 23 [obituary]

1949

Russo, Dorothy R., and Thelma L. Sullivan. A Bibliography of Booth Tarkington. Indianapolis, 1949

1955

Woodress, James. Booth Tarkington: Gentleman from Indiana. Philadelphia, 1955

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