Booth Tarkington

"Here are three indispensable works from the Pulitzer Prize-winning laureate of the American heartland, including the novels that inspired a classic film by Orson Welles and an Oscar-nominated performance by Katharine Hepburn. The Magnificent Ambersons depicts the fall from grace of George Minafer, scion of the once-unassailable Amberson family whose wealth and grandeur are in precipitous decline. Alice Adams, perhaps Booth Tarkington's greatest work,...

"Orson Welles's beautiful, nostalgia-suffused second feature--the subject of one of cinema's greatest missing-footage tragedies--harks back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Indianapolis, chronicling the inexorable decline in the fortunes of an affluent family. Adapted from an acclaimed Booth Tarkington novel and featuring restlessly inventive camera work and powerful performances from a cast including Joseph Cotten, Tim Holt, and Agnes Moorehead,...

"Lily just knows she has the talent to light up the Great White Way, so when a big Broadway producer ... visits her [Indiana] hometown, she expends all the candlepower of her charisma to impress him. He's not impressed. He heads back to New York and Lily follows, thumbing her way east on what she's sure is a one-way trip to instant stardom"--Container.