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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Midlander," Booth Tarkington masterfully explores the complexities of American life in the early 20th century, using a sharp narrative style that blends realism with poignant character development. Set against the backdrop of a midwestern city, the novel intricately weaves themes of ambition, social class, and the pursuit of the American Dream. Tarkington employs rich, descriptive prose and a nuanced dialogue that captures the idiosyncrasies of his characters, revealing their inner conflicts and desires, all while critiquing the societal norms of the time. Booth Tarkington, an esteemed American novelist and playwright awarded the Pulitzer Prize, was heavily influenced by his experiences growing up in Indiana, a region that inspired much of his work. His affinity for capturing the spirit of middle America is evident in "The Midlander," as he reflects on the transitional period of industrialization, and the impact it has on both individuals and communities. Tarkington's own observations of societal changes and his deep understanding of human motives imbue the narrative with authenticity. Readers seeking a compelling and thought-provoking exploration of American identity will find "The Midlander" an essential addition to their literary collection. Tarkington's deft storytelling and adept characterizations create a richly immersive experience, making this novel not only a historical portrait but also a timeless reflection on human nature and societal evolution. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Midlander
Table of Contents
Introduction
A city swells like a tide against its own edges, drawing families, fortunes, and fragile loyalties into the churn of advancement where desire promises belonging even as the streets themselves seem to move beneath one’s feet.
Booth Tarkington’s The Midlander, published in the early 1920s, presents a Midwestern city in the midst of dramatic change and follows a middle-class household as it navigates the pull of new neighborhoods, new money, and new expectations. Written by a leading American novelist of the period—twice honored with the Pulitzer Prize for other works—this book situates its characters in a fictional metropolis closely resembling Indianapolis. Without divulging the plot’s turns, its central premise is clear: people pursue security and recognition while the ground of custom shifts under accelerating modern life.
The novel has earned classic status for the precision with which it captures a society remaking itself at street level. Tarkington examines the rituals of home and business, the allure of respectable success, and the cost of ceaseless growth. He renders sidewalks, storefronts, and parlors as stages where ambitions collide with habit and with conscience. The Midlander endures because it dramatizes a universal predicament: how ordinary people seek dignity in a culture measuring worth by motion. The book’s urban realism remains fresh, inviting readers to watch the city think and feel through the lives of those who build it.
Tarkington’s prose joins clear-eyed social observation with a tempered, humane wit. He portrays prosperity’s glow alongside its long shadows—anxieties about status, pressures of conformity, and the subtle hardening of hearts when comfort becomes creed. Yet his tone is never merely scolding; he is attentive to tenderness, to the decencies that persist even in boom times. The result is a narrative that neither sanctifies nor condemns its strivers, but studies their choices in context. Streets, houses, and workplaces become resonant settings, giving the reader a palpable sense of rooms lived in and avenues traveled at once hopefully and warily.
The Midlander is often grouped with The Turmoil and The Magnificent Ambersons as a loose cycle about American growth. Together, these novels chart different vantage points on change—old prestige, new industry, and the rising middle class. This volume’s contribution is distinct: it focuses on those who believe they can meet modernity halfway, adapting without surrendering identity. By tracing their compromises and convictions, Tarkington composes a panoramic study of a city learning to value motion itself. That continuity within his body of work helps explain why the book remains a touchstone of American urban fiction.
The book’s classic standing also rests on its durable themes. It explores how swiftly expanding cities reframe ideas of neighborhood, reputation, and home. It probes the bittersweet promise of “starting over” that accompanies each new streetcar line or subdivision and tests the assumption that comfort equals contentment. At its core is a question that has not aged: what does success mean when standards are set by the speed of surrounding change? Tarkington answers by showing consequences rather than preaching conclusions, giving the novel an integrity that continues to attract serious readers.
Literary influence is seldom a single line, but The Midlander helped delineate a territory—Midwestern, urban, commercially minded—where later American realists and social satirists would continue to work. Its cityscape of storefronts and bungalow blocks, its attention to the cadences of ordinary ambition, and its critique of boosterism without disdain all proved generative. Writers who examine suburbia, civic identity, and the marketplace’s moral weather have found precedents here. The novel’s method—charting modernity through everyday transactions and small decisions—became a recognizable approach to portraying American life.
Historically, the novel belongs to the post–World War I era, when prosperity accelerated technological adoption and reconfigured urban space. The book reflects the era’s fascination with mobility and the engineered extension of city limits, attending to the ways transportation and real estate reshaped habits, friendships, and aspirations. Tarkington observes how streets create character even as people imagine they are simply choosing addresses. He records the subtle etiquette of new neighborhoods—the signals of arrival, the anxieties of not quite fitting—and reveals how this etiquette can sustain kindness or breed pettiness, depending on what communities choose to honor.
Tarkington’s craft makes these social dynamics vivid without resorting to melodrama. Dialogue carries the rhythms of the Midwest, measured but expressive; description is concrete, attentive to light, weather, and architecture. Scenes move from drawing rooms to shop counters to curbside exchanges, each location a theater of status and sympathy. The narrator’s steady gaze allows moral insight to emerge from setting and behavior rather than from pronouncement. In this way, The Midlander exemplifies a realism that respects readers’ intelligence, inviting them to weigh evidence and infer motives as the city and its inhabitants test one another.
The novel is especially shrewd about aspiration. Its characters are not caricatures of greed; they are recognizable people weighing debts, favors, and futures. The pressure to “keep up” is rendered as a matter of pacing as much as pocketbook, a negotiation between public display and private contentment. Tarkington is alert to generational differences—how younger eyes see promise where older ones see peril—yet he resists pitting age against youth. Instead, he portrays a community rehearsing modernity, trying on the costume of progress and discovering where it fits and where it binds.
Reading The Midlander today is to encounter both time capsule and mirror. The particular dress, slang, and fixtures belong to the 1920s, but the moral weather—anxieties about status, debates about density and sprawl, the tug-of-war between belonging and self-definition—remains recognizable. The novel asks readers to consider what a city owes its people and what people owe their city, not as abstractions but as daily practice. In that balance, Tarkington locates the drama of ordinary life, making the book feel as alive in the present as it was upon publication.
Ultimately, The Midlander persists because it marries social breadth to emotional clarity. Its streets echo in today’s subdivisions; its questions animate current conversations about community, mobility, and meaning. As an artifact of a transformative American decade and as a living work of art, it rewards attention with insight rather than nostalgia. By connecting private hopes to public spaces, Tarkington created a novel that continues to illuminate how we build, dwell, and define ourselves. In reading it now, we learn how far we have traveled—and how near we remain to the crossroads it so carefully maps.
Synopsis
Booth Tarkington’s The Midlander is a novel set in a rapidly changing Midwestern American city. Published in the 1920s, it observes the forces reshaping civic life and the private calculations of people drawn into that momentum. Following a central figure whose energies are directed toward business and public improvement, the narrative traces how ambition, respectability, and the idea of progress become a single pursuit. Tarkington situates the story amid streets being widened, new districts surveyed, and a citizenry learning the language of development. The tone is observant rather than polemical, attending to gestures, meetings, and everyday choices where the city’s future is negotiated.
In its early chapters, the book presents a town still remembering older manners while embracing new efficiencies. Yards shrink as lots are platted; trolleys and motorcars alter distances; booster clubs publish forecasts. The protagonist begins at the edges of that movement, fascinated by its speed and the promise that practical men can remake a map. Tarkington shows how photographs, prospectuses, and luncheon speeches can kindle careers. Our central figure learns that influence is built in committee rooms and parlors as much as on job sites. As he moves from onlooker to participant, the drama remains intimate, grounded in small negotiations and gradual commitments.
Family and neighborhood relations provide the counterweight to civic appetite. An older generation’s standards—measured conversation, caution about public display, suspicion of novelty—stand in quiet opposition to the brisk talk of expansion. The protagonist navigates social thresholds that are both literal and symbolic, from modest streets to more prominent addresses, never entirely sure which invitations confer acceptance. Tarkington registers snobbery and goodwill in equal portions, making the city’s hierarchy porous yet palpable. A sentimental allegiance to familiar places competes with the allure of new subdivisions. Ambition here is domestic as well as commercial, shaped by the wish to belong without surrendering individuality.
Professional opportunity arrives through practical channels: partnerships, contracts, and the careful cultivation of acquaintances who can open doors. Tarkington dwells on the rituals of meetings—the agenda, the chair’s gavel, the murmur after a vote—to show how policy takes shape. The protagonist acquires the habits of civic persuasion, learning when to promise efficiency and when to promise beauty. The novel’s middle distance fills with surveyors’ stakes, estimates, and revised maps. Progress proves incremental, yet the cumulative effect is dramatic. Minor embarrassments, misread intentions, and a few public setbacks check his momentum without halting it, sharpening his sense of what victory might require.
A signature improvement emerges as the book’s organizing venture, a plan meant to knit disparate quarters into a coherent whole. The scheme demands not only money and permits but also imagination—what the city could look like if streets, utilities, and commerce were harmonized. Tarkington stages debates where homeowners fear assessments, shopkeepers hope for foot traffic, and officials weigh prestige against debt. The protagonist becomes a tireless advocate, adjusting talking points to each audience while testing his own beliefs. The project’s promise exposes frictions over property, memory, and public space, revealing how civic dreams are compromised, defended, and, sometimes, enlarged by compromise.
Parallel to civic agitation runs the texture of private life: friendships complicated by rivalry, attachments tempered by expectation, and households whose budgets and manners are part of the same calculus as bonds and contracts. Tarkington is attentive to how public posture enters the living room—what one wears, how one speaks, and which invitations are accepted. The protagonist’s confidence in arenas of policy does not always translate into domestic ease. Misunderstandings and silences accumulate, less as melodrama than as the residue of long days and postponed conversations. The question becomes whether a well-ordered city can compensate for the disorder within one’s rooms.
As the plan advances, the city’s transformation becomes visible in ways both exhilarating and troubling. New routes shorten commutes, vacant fields sprout roofs, and venturesome retailers follow the grading crews. Yet the light falls differently on familiar corners; trees come down; noise and signage assert themselves. Tarkington neither romanticizes what is lost nor celebrates every gain. He lays out the ledger and lets readers notice what resists accounting: the sense of belonging that clings to an alley, the pride stirred by a skyline. The protagonist begins to register that his own identity is entangled with an urban experiment he cannot fully direct.
Momentum carries the narrative toward a test of character, framed as a choice less between right and wrong than between competing loyalties. Allies press for decisive action; critics find their moment; personal history intrudes on public plans. The central figure is forced to weigh reputation against conscience, advantage against continuity. Tarkington structures these pressures without sensational shock, preferring cumulative tension to abrupt reversal. A few scenes of quiet recognition—faces in a crowd, an unexpected kindness, a street seen at a different hour—ask what success will mean once the maps are printed. The resolution is shaped by values the book has steadily examined.
The Midlander ultimately offers a measured anatomy of American boosterism and the private hopes it recruits. Without denying industry’s benefits, Tarkington probes the costs of pursuing growth as an end in itself, especially where civic pride blurs into self-promotion. The book’s enduring significance lies in its patience: it watches how cities persuade themselves, and how individuals translate that persuasion into identity. By focusing on the compromises embedded in streets and households, it invites readers to consider what kind of improvement truly improves. The questions it leaves open—about belonging, responsibility, and memory—keep the novel resonant beyond its specific time and place.
Historical Context
Booth Tarkington’s The Midlander is set in an unnamed Midwestern city closely modeled on Indianapolis during the early decades of the twentieth century. The narrative’s frame is an urban landscape dominated by factories, rail lines, streetcar routes, banks, real-estate firms, insurance companies, and an increasingly assertive city hall allied with business groups. Protestant churches, newspapers, and social clubs set norms of respectability. Residential districts of older houses lie within commuting distance of a bustling downtown, while new avenues and plats push outward. The book unfolds within this matrix of civic institutions and physical expansion, where property lines, public works, and reputations determine opportunity and status.
From roughly 1900 to 1920, Midwestern cities experienced rapid growth as regional industrial hubs. Indianapolis, the model for Tarkington’s city, grew from about 170,000 residents in 1900 to over 300,000 by 1920. Migrants from surrounding farms and small towns, along with immigrants and later internal migrants, filled factories and offices. Families who had defined social prestige in the late nineteenth century found their primacy challenged by newly prosperous industrialists, agents, and developers. The Midlander echoes this shift, depicting how urban growth reordered social hierarchies: inherited standing becomes precarious, while nimble actors who grasp the new economy’s rhythms gain influence, money, and space.
Transportation transformed everyday life. The mass-produced automobile—exemplified by Ford’s Model T (1908–1927)—expanded rapidly; by the early 1920s millions of cars were on U.S. roads. Federal legislation, including the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 and the Federal Highway Act of 1921, funded paving and intercity connections, while streetcar systems strained to compete with rising car ownership. New paving, garages, and filling stations reshaped neighborhoods, and the commute redefined where to live and invest. Throughout Tarkington’s urban fiction, the car’s momentum—and the noise, dust, and speculation it triggers—presses against older districts. The Midlander situates status and value along traffic arteries where accessibility eclipses tradition.
Real estate was the business of the 1910s and 1920s city. Developers platted farmland into subdivisions; builders marketed standardized houses; and buyers relied on building-and-loan associations and short-term, often balloon-style, mortgages. Zoning, introduced in New York City in 1916 and propagated nationwide after the U.S. Commerce Department’s model enabling acts in the mid-1920s, sought to separate land uses and stabilize values. The Midlander immerses readers in the speculative logic of frontage and corner lots, siting along prominent avenues, and the cascading consequences of commercial encroachment. Property talk—setbacks, paving assessments, utility extensions—becomes a language of power, capturing how families gamble on location.
Civic boosterism was a dominant Midwestern ethos. Chambers of Commerce, real-estate boards, and promotion bureaus pursued conventions, factories, and annexations under slogans promising “Greater” cities. Business leaders published prospectuses, courted railroad schedules, and urged public improvements as investments in collective destiny. The Midlander mirrors this cadence of optimism, placing in dialogue the boosters who equate bigger with better and the skeptics who fear debt, blight, or the loss of neighborhood character. Tarkington records the era’s rhetoric—prosperity quantified in frontage feet and payrolls—while showing how such talk filters into households, shaping ambitions, anxieties, and the terms of civic belonging.
Municipal politics and private enterprise were tightly interwoven. Utilities—electricity, gas, water, and street railways—operated through franchises negotiated with city councils and regulated increasingly by state public service commissions established in many states during the 1910s. Paving contracts, sewer extensions, and rezoning decisions offered opportunities for influence, reform, and contention. Midwestern cities alternated between “business administrations” and reform waves seeking transparency and professional management. The Midlander foregrounds this governance terrain: council chambers, committee rooms, and back offices where infrastructure decisions make and unmake fortunes, and where civic ideals—efficiency, progress, fairness—are tested against political realities.
The Progressive Era’s urban vision emphasized planning, sanitation, and beautification. Inspired by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, reformers promoted the City Beautiful movement, advocating parks, boulevards, and coherent civic centers. At the same time, unregulated market pressures produced jumbled streetscapes: billboards, sheds, and ad hoc storefronts. The Midlander registers the friction between idealized avenues and the uneven, often hasty construction that accompanied booms. Sewers, curbs, and lighting arrive unevenly; parkways coexist with encroaching commerce. Tarkington’s city thus becomes a case study in partial planning: sufficient order to raise expectations, insufficient discipline to preserve the older neighborhoods’ scale.
World War I reshaped Midwestern economies. Factories secured war contracts; employment surged; and municipal services strained under growth. The 1918 influenza pandemic disrupted civic life, and the postwar years brought a volatile sequence: a strike wave in 1919, a sharp recession in 1920–1921, then renewed expansion. The Midlander absorbs these rhythms obliquely—through a city quick to seize opportunity, wary of uncertainty, and eager to resume building. Veterans, new office routines, and fluctuating prices enter the background. The war’s battlefield heroics sit offstage; what the novel scrutinizes is the home front’s reordered priorities and the speed with which urban plans resume.
Prohibition, in effect nationwide from 1920 to 1933, altered social habits and municipal politics. The Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act closed saloons and pushed alcohol consumption into private clubs and illicit venues, spawning enforcement controversies. In many Midwestern communities, respectability rhetoric aligned with business-minded calls for order, even as speakeasies and discreet drinking persisted. Tarkington rarely dwells on sensationalism, but The Midlander’s social world—receptions, business dinners, civic functions—unfolds under Prohibition’s codes of public sobriety. The contrast between outward propriety and private indulgence contributes to the novel’s portrait of manners, restraint, and the staged performances of upright citizenship.
Demographic change redefined neighborhoods. Between approximately 1916 and 1930, more than a million African Americans left the South in the Great Migration, many settling in Midwestern cities; new communities formed amid entrenched segregation and discriminatory housing practices. Restrictive covenants, widely used by the 1910s and 1920s and upheld as enforceable by federal courts in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), shaped residential patterns. The Midlander, written within mainstream white middle-class perspectives, reflects a city attentive to property values and boundaries. The novel’s real-estate consciousness thus intersects with a broader national framework in which race, class, and investment guided who could live—and prosper—where.
Nativism crested nationally in the early 1920s. In Indiana, the Second Ku Klux Klan achieved notable political influence in the mid-1920s, projecting a program of “100 percent Americanism,” moral regulation, and exclusion. Municipal offices and legislatures saw Klan-backed candidates win and, in some cases, fall amid scandal. While The Midlander does not center on such organizations, its milieu is saturated with pressures to conform: clean streets, correct conduct, and the policing of reputation. That climate matters historically. Civic unanimity could mobilize improvements and mask coercion, shaping urban discourse in which dissent from growth orthodoxy—or from the reigning moral code—risked social penalties.
Women’s roles were in flux. The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) secured women’s suffrage nationwide; female employment expanded in offices, retail, and schools; and new social styles signaled generational change. Yet marriage, domesticity, and reputation still governed much middle-class life. The Midlander presents women as key arbiters of status within neighborhoods and families, navigating choices about education, work, and marriage that reflect the period’s shifting possibilities. Home management and taste—furnishings, address, entertaining—become instruments of aspiration. The novel’s attention to domestic space situates it within a broader history in which the house, not only the factory, was a site of modernity’s negotiation.
Consumer culture accelerated during the 1920s. Department stores, mail-order catalogs, and chain retailers expanded, while national advertising standardized desires. Installment credit enabled households to purchase cars, radios, and appliances, and urban electrification and telephones grew rapidly in cities during this period. Such changes affected both how residents lived and how they measured success. The Midlander registers the status value of objects—automobiles foremost—and of addresses aligned with new commercial corridors. Taste is not trivial here; it is the visible edge of economic structure. The novel’s material textures anchor its social critique, showing how consumption mediates belonging and exclusion.
Workplaces diversified as white-collar employment grew alongside manufacturing. The eight-hour day gained traction; employers’ associations pressed “open shop” campaigns; and the 1919 strike wave revealed widespread labor militancy before business regained momentum in the early 1920s. In Midwestern cities, civic elites stressed harmony and growth, often prioritizing investment climates over labor demands. The Midlander reflects this middle-class emphasis on order and productivity, treating business acumen as both a personal virtue and a civic asset. Yet the friction between payrolls and people surfaces implicitly: the desire to keep streets quiet, contracts steady, and markets expanding collides with the disorder growth itself produces.
Urban expansion carried environmental and aesthetic costs. Coal smoke, traffic congestion, and accident rates rose; anti-smoke and traffic reform campaigns emerged. City councils widened streets, cut new thoroughfares, and tolerated aggressive signage, often sacrificing older homes. Tarkington’s urban novels criticize the automobile’s indifference to place, and The Midlander shares that sensibility: venerable residential blocks yield to storefronts; front yards to curb cuts. The lament is not merely nostalgic. It assesses how boosterism discounts quiet, shade, and human scale—amenities once treated as marks of civilization—by revaluing land exclusively through speed, access, and quarterly returns.
The Midlander belongs to Tarkington’s loose “Growth” trilogy, alongside The Turmoil (1915) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1918). Published in 1923 and revised as National Avenue in 1924, it occupies the phase when the automobile and real-estate development drive the city’s next remake. Across these books, Tarkington traces the displacement of nineteenth-century elites by industrial and commercial fortunes, using a single, unnamed Midwestern city as a longitudinal case. The Midlander updates the case for the 1920s: speculative avenues replace grand boulevards, and civic pride—the very language of progress—becomes both the engine of change and the alibi for its costs.
Tarkington spoke from intimate knowledge of his milieu. Born in Indianapolis in 1869 and educated at Princeton, he moved easily in Midwestern business and political circles and served briefly in the Indiana legislature in the early 1900s. By the 1920s he was among America’s most prominent novelists, winning Pulitzer Prizes for The Magnificent Ambersons (awarded 1919) and Alice Adams (awarded 1922). His stature gave him a wide audience for reflections on urban transformation. That vantage—insider access coupled with a reformist, often aesthetic, concern—shaped The Midlander’s close attention to property, streets, and manners as the decisive registers of civic life and change in the heartland. The Midlander functions as both mirror and critique of its era. It reflects the 1920s city’s confidence in business-led progress: roads as destiny, frontage as value, and reputation as currency. Yet it also records the attrition of place—the erasure of social memory by traffic, speculation, and booster rhetoric. Without spoiling plot turns, one can say that Tarkington measures success against its human and environmental tolls. He captures a moment when the Middle West mapped its future on avenues, and asks what, and whom, that map leaves behind.
Author Biography
Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) was an American novelist and dramatist whose work became central to portrayals of Midwestern life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Writing across the Progressive Era and into the interwar years, he examined class, adolescence, and the upheavals brought by industrial growth. Widely read in his lifetime, he was one of the few novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel/Fiction twice, for The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. His fiction, frequently adapted for stage and screen, combined social observation with humor and an accessible narrative style, making him a dominant figure in popular American literature for several decades.
Raised in Indianapolis, Tarkington drew enduring material from his Midwestern surroundings. He studied at Purdue University and later at Princeton University, where he was active in literary and theatrical societies, including the Triangle Club. Campus dramatics honed his ear for dialogue and stagecraft, influences that would mark both his novels and plays. His reading and early efforts aligned with American realism and the genteel tradition, though his best work pushed beyond nostalgia to record the tensions of modernization. The cultural and civic life of his home city, together with university theater and broader realist currents, formed the backdrop for his first sustained attempts at fiction.
Tarkington’s early career advanced quickly with The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), which established his regional authority, followed by the courtly romance Monsieur Beaucaire (1900). He continued to publish prolifically, with works such as The Two Vanrevels and The Conquest of Canaan, and he moved with ease between fiction and the stage. In the theater he collaborated with Harry Leon Wilson, notably on the successful play The Man from Home, confirming his reputation as a versatile storyteller. Critics often noted his deft pacing and comic timing, qualities traceable to his dramatic training, while readers responded to his portraits of ambition, civic pride, and manners in small American cities.
During the 1910s Tarkington reached a mature phase, producing a series of widely read novels about urban expansion and social change. The Turmoil and The Magnificent Ambersons explored the transformation of a Midwestern city, often regarded as parts of a loose “Growth” sequence alongside The Midlander. In parallel, he created enduring depictions of youth in Penrod and Seventeen, works celebrated for their comic yet sympathetic view of adolescence. The Magnificent Ambersons earned the Pulitzer Prize, praised for its portrayal of industrialization’s impact on traditional elites. Across these books he balanced warmth and satire, capturing both the energy and the dislocation of an America remade by factories, fortunes, and new technologies.
The early 1920s consolidated his fame. Alice Adams, a novel of social aspiration and dignity under economic constraint, brought Tarkington a second Pulitzer Prize and confirmed his authority on class and manners. He remained a perennial bestseller through the decade, continuing to chronicle Midwestern mores and the costs of rapid change. Alongside fiction, he wrote essays that criticized aspects of modern life—especially the noise, congestion, and cultural shifts associated with automobiles and industrial growth. He also served a term in the Indiana legislature in the early 1900s, an experience that sharpened his interest in civic life and public affairs, themes that surface repeatedly in his work.
Tarkington’s later years were marked by both challenges and productivity. He experienced significant hearing loss, which reshaped his routines, and he divided his time between Indianapolis and coastal Maine while continuing to write. His memoir, The World Does Move, reflected on art, theater, and the transformations he had witnessed. Many of his books reached broader audiences through adaptations: Alice Adams became a celebrated film in the 1930s, and Orson Welles’s 1942 screen version of The Magnificent Ambersons reinforced the novel’s canonical status. These adaptations kept his characters and themes alive in popular culture even as critical tastes increasingly favored modernist experiment.
Tarkington died in 1946, by then a symbol of an earlier literary era that had captured the American middle class in transition. His legacy rests on lucid storytelling, finely observed social settings, and an ability to dramatize the promises and disruptions of modernity in the Midwest. Though later overshadowed by modernist contemporaries, he remains essential to understanding how American fiction negotiated industrialization, urban growth, and changing manners. Ongoing scholarly interest, periodic revivals of his novels, and enduring film adaptations maintain his visibility. As one of the few two-time Pulitzer winners, he stands as a major figure in the popular and critical history of American narrative.
The Midlander
CHAPTER I
PEOPLE used to say of the two Oliphant brothers that Harlan Oliphant looked as if he lived in the Oliphants’ house, but Dan didn’t. This was a poor sort of information to any one who had never seen the house, but of course the supposition was that everybody had seen it and was familiar with its significance. It stood in a great, fine yard, in that row of great, fine yards at the upper end of National Avenue, before the avenue swung off obliquely and changed its name to Amberson Boulevard. The houses in the long row were such houses as are built no more; bricklayers worked for a dollar a day and the workman’s day was ten hours long when National Avenue grew into its glory. Those houses were of a big-walled solidity to withstand time, fire, and tornado, but they found another assailant not to be resisted by anything: this conqueror, called Progress, being the growth of the city. Until the growth came they were indomitable and fit for the centuries.
Moreover, they were of a dignified spaciousness not now to be accomplished except by millionaires with wives content to spend their days getting new servants. The New Yorker, admitted to these interiors upon a visit westward, discovered an amplitude with which he had little familiarity at home, where the brownstone fronts and squeezed apartments showed him no such suites of big rooms; for, of all the million people in New York, only a dozen families could have houses comparable in size or stateliness. “Stately” was the word, though here some little care must be taken, of course, with an eye to those who will not admit that anything short of Blenheim or the Luxembourg[1] is stately. The stateliness of the Oliphants’ house was precisely the point in that popular discrimination between the two young men who lived there: Harlan Oliphant, like the house, was supposed to partake of this high quality, but stateliness was the last thing any one ever thought of in connection with Dan.
The youth of the brothers, in the happy and comfortable nineties of the last century, is well remembered in their city, where the Christmas holidays could never be thought really begun till the two Oliphants had arrived from college and their broad-shouldered, long-tailed coats and incredibly high white collars were seen officially moving in the figures of a cotillion[2]. They usually arrived on the same day, though often not by the same train; but this was the mark of no disagreement or avoidance of each other, yet bore some significance upon the difference between them. It was the fashion to say of them that never were two brothers so alike yet so unlike; and although both were tall, with blue eyes, brown hair, and features of pleasant contour decisively outlined in what is called a family likeness, people who knew them well found it a satisfying and insoluble puzzle that they were the offspring of the same father and mother.
The contrast appeared in childhood and was manifest to even the casual onlooker when Dan Oliphant was eleven or twelve years old and Harlan ten or eleven. At that age Harlan was already an aristocrat, and, what is more remarkable, kept himself always immaculate. If his collar rumpled or was soiled he went immediately to his room and got a fresh one; he washed his hands three or four times a day without parental suggestion and he brushed his hair almost every time he washed his hands. He was fastidious in his choice of companions, had no taste for chance acquaintances, and on a school holiday could most frequently be found in the library at home, reading a book beyond his years. The lively Daniel, on the contrary, disported himself about the neighbourhood—or about other neighbourhoods, for that matter—in whatever society offered him any prospect of gayety. He played marbles “for keeps” with ragtag and bobtail on every vacant lot in town; he never washed his hands or face, or brushed his hair, except upon repeated command, yet loved water well enough to “run off swimming” and dive through a film of ice upon an early Saturday in March. He regaled himself with horseplay up and down the alleys and had long talks with negro coachmen in their stables, acquiring strange wisdom of them; he learned how to swear with some intricacy, how to smoke almost anything not fireproof, how to “inhale,” how to gamble with implements more sophisticated than marbles, and how to keep all these accomplishments from the knowledge of his parents. He kept them from Harlan’s knowledge, also, though not out of any fear that Harlan would “tell.”
At some time in their early childhood the brothers had made the discovery that they were uncongenial. This is not to say that they were unamiable together, but that they had assumed a relation not wholly unknown among brothers. They spoke to each other when it was necessary; but usually, if they happened to find themselves together, they were silent, each apparently unconscious of the other’s presence. Sometimes, though rarely, they had a short argument, seldom upon a subject of great importance; and only once did a difference between them attain the dimensions of a quarrel.
This was on a summer day of feverish temperature, and the heat may have had something to do with the emotion displayed by young Daniel, then aged twelve. He was engaged, that afternoon, with a business friend, Master Sam Kohn, and they were importantly busy in a latticed summer-house, an ornament of the commodious lawn. They had entered into a partnership for the sale of “Fancy Brackets and Fittings,” which they manufactured out of old cigar boxes, with the aid of glue, a jig-saw, and blue paint. The computed profits were already enormous, though no sales had been attempted, since the glue was slow to harden on such a hot day; and the partners worked diligently, glad to shed their perspiration for the steadily increasing means to obtain riches.
At five o’clock Harlan dropped lightly from the big stone-trimmed bay window of the library, crossed the lawn, where the grass was being gilded now by the westering sun, and halted before the entrance of the summer-house. He was the picture of a cool young gentleman, perfect in white linen; his coat and trousers of this pleasant material were unflawed by wrinkle or stain; his patent-leather pumps, unmarred by the slightest crack, glittered among the short green blades of grass; his small black satin tie was as smooth as his brown hair.
To this perfection the busy partners within the summer-house were a sufficient contrast. Soiled blue upon every available surface, they continued their labours, paying no visible attention to the cold-eyed young observer, but consulting each other perhaps the more importantly because of the presence of an audience, however skeptical. Master Kohn, swarthy, bow-legged, and somewhat undersized for his thirteen years, was in fact pleased to be associated with the superior Harlan, even so tenuously. He was pleased, also, to be a partner of Dan’s, though this was no great distinction, because Dan, as the boys’ world knew, would willingly be friendly (or even intimate) with anybody, and consequently no social advancement was to be obtained through him. That commodity is to be had of only those who decline to deal in it, and thus Sam Kohn felt that he was becoming imbued with a certain amount of superiority because Harlan Oliphant had come to look on at the work.
Sam decided to make a suggestion. “Look at your brother,” he said to Dan. “Maybe he’d like to git into our partnership. We could give him a share, if he starts in fresh and works hard.”
“Thanks!” Harlan said with cold sarcasm, and addressed his brother: “Do you know what time it is and what the family is supposed to do this evening?”
“Yes,” Dan answered, not looking up from his jig-saw. “We’re goin’ to dinner at grandma Savage’s.”
“Mother sent me to tell you it’s time for you to come in and wash yourself and dress up,” said Harlan. “The mess you’ve got yourself in, it’ll take you till after six o’clock, and we’re supposed to be there then.”
“Sam and I got some pretty important jobs to finish,” Dan returned carelessly. “I got plenty time to change my clo’es and get washed up.”
“No, you haven’t. You quit playing with that boy and those dirty things and go in the house.”
Upon this, Dan stopped the operation of the jig-saw and looked at his brother in a puzzled way. “What you mean callin’ our brackets and fittin’s ‘dirty things?’ ” he inquired. “I expect you don’t hardly realize Sam Kohn and I got a regular factory here, Harlan.”
“A ‘factory,’ is it?” said Harlan, and laughed in the manner of a contemptuous adult. “Well, you close up your old factory and come in the house and get ready.”
“I can’t for a while,” Dan returned, beginning his work with the jig-saw again. “I told you we got lots to do before we quit to-night.”
“You stop playing with that silly little saw,” Harlan said sharply, for he had begun to feel some irritation. “You come in the house right this instant.”
“No; I can’t yet, Harlan. Sam and I got to——”
“Never mind!” Harlan interrupted. “You come in the house and let this boy go home.”
There was a frosty sharpness in his way of saying “let this boy go home” that caused Dan to stop his work again and stare at his brother challengingly. “Here!” he exclaimed. “This is as much my father and mother’s yard as it is yours, and you got no business hintin’ at any friend of mine to go home.”
“Haven’t I?” Harlan inquired, adopting a light mockery. “So this is a friend of yours, is it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Oh, a friend?” Harlan mocked. “Oh, excuse me! I didn’t understand!”
This proved to be intolerably provocative;—Dan abandoned the jig-saw and stepped out of the summer-house to confront his brother frowningly. “You shut up, Harlan Oliphant,” he said. “This is Sam Kohn’s and my factory, and he’s got a right here. You quit your talkin’ so much around here.”
“You quit your own talking,” Harlan retorted. “You do what mother sent me to tell you to, and let that dirty little Jew go home!”
“What?” Dan cried.
“You better!” Harlan said, standing his ground, though Dan lifted his hand threateningly. “We don’t want any dirty little Jews on our premises.”
Dan gulped. “It isn’t his fault he’s a Jew. You take that back!”
“I won’t,” said Harlan. “He is little and he is dirty and he’s a Jew[1q]. How you going to deny it?”
Flushed with anger and greatly perplexed, Dan glanced over his shoulder at Master Kohn, who looked on with an inscrutable expression. “Well, what if I can’t?” Dan said desperately, after this glance at his guest and partner. “You got no right to insult him.”
“It isn’t an insult if it’s true, is it?”
“Yes, it is; and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I got a notion—I got a notion——”
“What notion have you got?” Harlan asked scornfully, as his brother paused, swallowing heavily.
“I got a notion to make you ashamed!”
“How would you do it?”
“ ‘How?’ I’ll show you how!” And again Dan’s clenched right hand lowered threateningly. The brothers stood eye to eye, and both faces were red.
“Go on,” said Harlan. “Hit me!”
Dan’s fist, like his expression, wavered for a moment, then he said: “Well, I wish you weren’t my brother; but you are, and I won’t hit you.”
“I thought you wouldn’t,” Harlan retorted, turning toward the house. “I guess I’ll have to tell mother you won’t wash yourself and dress until she comes and sends this dirty little Jew out of our yard.”
Thus, having discovered the tender spot in his opponent’s sensibilities, he avenged himself for the threat, and went on. His brother moved impulsively, as if to follow and punish, but Mrs. Oliphant had long ago impressed her sons heavily with the story of Cain and Abel, and he halted, while Harlan went on coolly and disappeared into the house by a side entrance.
“Doggone you!” Dan muttered; then turned back to the factory, where Master Kohn, his head down and his hands in his pockets, was scuffing sawdust meditatively with the soles of his shoes. Dan likewise scuffed sawdust for a time.
“Well,” Sam Kohn said finally, “I guess I better go on home before your mamma comes to turn me out.”
“I don’t guess she would,” Dan said, not looking at him, but keeping his gaze upon his own scuffing shoe. “She’s got a good deal o’ politeness about her, and I don’t guess she would. You got a right to stay here long as you want, Sammy. It’s half your factory.”
“Not if your family puts me out, it ain’t.”
“He had no business to call you that, Sammy.”
“To call me which?”
“A—a Jew,” said Dan, still keeping his eyes upon the ground.
“Why, I am a Jew.”
“Well, maybe; but——” Dan paused uncomfortably, then continued: “Well, he didn’t have any right to call you one.”
“Yes, he had,” Sam returned, to his friend’s surprise. “He could call me a Jew just the same I could call you English.”
“English? I’m not English.”
“Well, you’re from English.”
“No,” Dan protested mildly. “Not for a couple o’ hundred years, anyway.”
“Well, I ain’t from Jews a couple thousand years, maybe.”
“But I’m full-blooded American,” said Dan.
“So’m I,” Sam insisted. “You’re American from English, and I’m American from Jews. He’s got a right to call me a Jew.”
Dan stared at him incredulously. “Don’t you mind it?”
“Yes,” Sam admitted, “I do when he says it for a insult. He’s got a right to call me a Jew, but he hasn’t got no right to call me a Jew for a insult.”
“Well, he did,” Dan remarked gloomily. “He meant it the way you might call somebody ‘Irish’ or ‘Dutchy’ or ‘Nigger.’ ”
“I know it. He called me dirty and little, too. Well, I am little, but I ain’t no dirtier than what you are, Dan, and you’re his own brother.”
“Well, then, you oughtn’t to mind his callin’ you dirty, Sam.”
“He wouldn’t call you dirty the same way he would me,” Sam returned shrewdly; and then, after a momentary pause, he sighed and turned to go.
But that sigh of his, which had in it the quality of patience, strongly affected Dan’s sympathies, for a reason he could not have explained. “Don’t go, Sammy,” he said. “You don’t have to go just because he——”
“Yeh, I better,” Sam said, not looking back, but continuing to move toward the distant gate. “I better go before your mamma comes to put me out.”
Dan protested again, but Sam shook his head and went on across the lawn, his hands in his pockets, his head down. The high iron fence, painted white, culminated in an elaborate gateway, and, when Sam passed out to the sidewalk there, the iron gateposts rose far above him. Plodding out between these high white posts, the shabby little figure did not lack pathos; nor was pathos absent from it as it went doggedly down the street in the thinning gold of the late afternoon sunshine. Sam looked back not once; but Dan watched him until he was out of sight, then returned to the interior of the summer-house, sat down, and stared broodingly at the littered floor. The floor was not what he saw, however, for his actual eyes were without vision just then, and it was his mind’s eye that was busy. It dwelt upon the picture of the exiled Sam Kohn departing forlornly, and the longer it thus dwelt the warmer and more threatening grew a painful feeling that seemed to locate itself in Dan’s upper chest, not far below his collar bone.
This feeling remained there while he dressed; and it was still there when he sat down at his grandmother’s table for dinner. In fact, it so increased in poignancy that he could not eat with his customary heartiness; and his lack of appetite, though he made play with seemingly busy fork and spoon to cover it, fell under the sharp eye of the lady at the head of the table. She was a handsome, dominant old woman, with high colour in her cheeks at seventy-eight, and thick hair, darker than it was gray, under her lace cap. She sat straight upright in her stiff chair, for she detested easy-chairs and had never in all her life lounged in one or sat with her knees crossed; such things were done not by ladies, but by hoodlums, she said. Her husband, a gentle, submissive old man, was frail and bent with his years, though they had brought him great worldly prosperity; and the grandchildren of this couple never spoke of the house as “Grandpa Savage’s,” but always as “Grandma Savage’s,” an intuitive discrimination that revealed the rulership. Mrs. Savage ruled by means of a talent she had for destructive criticism, which several times prevented her optimistic husband from venturing into ruin, and had established her as the voice of wisdom.
“Daniel,” she said presently;—“you’re not eating.”
“Yes, I am, grandma.”
“No. Ever since you came to the table, you’ve been sitting there with your head bent down like that and moving your hands to pretend you’re eating, but not eating. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothin’,” he muttered, not lifting his head. “I’m all right.”
“Adelaide,” Mrs. Savage said to his mother;—“has his appetite been failing lately?”
“Why, no, mamma,” Mrs. Oliphant answered. She was a pretty woman, quietly cheerful and little given to alarms or anxieties. “Not seriously,” she added, smiling. “He did very well at lunch, at least.”
“He looks sickish,” said Mrs. Savage grimly. “He looks as if he were beginning a serious illness. Well people don’t sit with their heads down like that. What is the matter with you, Daniel?”
“Nothin’,” he said. “I told you I’m all right.”
“He isn’t though,” Mrs. Savage insisted, addressing the others. “Do you know what’s the matter with him, Harlan?”
“Too much glue, I expect.”
“What?”
“Too much glue,” Harlan repeated. “He was playing with a lot of nasty glue and paint all afternoon, and I expect the smell’s made him sick. Too much glue and too much Jew.”
“Jew?” his grandmother inquired. “What do you mean by ‘too much Jew,’ Harlan?”
“He had a dirty little bow-legged Jew playing with him.”
“See here!” Dan said huskily, but he did not look up. “You be careful!”
“Careful of what?” Harlan inquired scornfully.
“Careful of what you say.”
“Daniel, were you playing with a Jew?” his grandmother asked.
“Yes, I was.”
He still did not look up, but his voice had a tone, plaintive and badgered, that attracted the attention of his grandfather, and the old gentleman interposed soothingly: “Don’t let ’em fret you, Dannie. It wasn’t particularly wicked of you to play with a Jew, I expect.”
“No,” said Dan’s father. “I don’t believe I’d let myself be much worried over that, if I were you, Dan.”
“No?” said Mrs. Savage, and inquired further, somewhat formidably: “You don’t prefer your sons to choose companions from their own circle, Henry Oliphant?”
“Oh, yes, I do, ma’am,” he returned amiably. “As a general thing I believe it’s better for them to be intimate with the children of their mother’s and father’s old family friends; but at the same time I hope Dan and Harlan won’t forget that we live in a country founded on democratic principles. The population seems to me to begin to show signs of altering with emigration from Europe; and it’s no harm for the boys to know something of the new elements, though for that matter we’ve always had Jews, and they’re certainly not bad citizens. I don’t see any great harm in Dan’s playing a little with a Jewish boy, if he wants to.”
“I wasn’t playin’,” Dan said.
“Weren’t you?” his father asked. “What were you doing?”
“We were—we were manufacturing. We were manufacturing useful articles.”
“What were they?”
“Ornamental brackets to nail on walls and put things on. We were goin’ to make good money out of it.”
“Well, that was all right,” Mr. Oliphant said genially. “Not a bad idea at all. You’re all right, Dannie.”
Unfortunately, a word of sympathy often undermines the composure of the recipient; and upon this Dan’s lower lip began to quiver, though he inclined his head still farther to conceal the new tokens of his agitation.
He was not aided by his coolly observant young brother. “Going to cry about it?” Harlan asked, quietly amused.
“You let Dannie alone,” said the grandfather; whereupon Harlan laughed. “You ought to see what he and his little Jew partner called brackets!” he said. “Dan’s always thinking he’s making something, and it’s always something just awful. What he and that Sam Kohn were really making to-day was a horrible mess of our summer-house. It’ll take a week’s work for somebody to get it cleaned up, and he got mad at me and was going to hit me because mamma sent me to tell him to come in the house and get ready for dinner.”
“I did not,” Dan muttered.
