The Magnificent Ambersons
by Booth Tarkington
Summary
The Ambersons are the grandest family in a midland town that is recognisably Indianapolis, and George Amberson Minafer is their only grandchild, raised so magnificently spoiled that the town's dearest collective wish, stated on the first pages, is to live to see him get his comeuppance. The novel is the granting of that wish, and by the time it comes nobody enjoys it.
George grows up beautiful, arrogant and unemployable by conviction, and falls for Lucy Morgan, the level headed daughter of Eugene Morgan, an inventor betting everything on the horseless carriage. What George does not know is that Eugene and George's mother Isabel were nearly engaged twenty years before, and when George's father dies the two middle aged people move quietly back toward each other. George, appalled at the impropriety and at any rearrangement of a world with himself at the centre, breaks the match, takes his mother abroad, and destroys her happiness and his own inheritance in the same gesture.
Around this Tarkington runs the real story: the automobile remaking the town, soot settling on the white house fronts, the Amberson name literally disappearing from the map while the Morgans rise. The comeuppance, when it arrives, is industrial rather than moral, and the book's forgiveness of George in its last movement is either touching or too easy, depending on the reader.
Around three hundred pages, easy and swift.
Best for readers who want the great American novel of old money losing to new machinery, and the book behind the Welles film.
Historical Context & Significance
The Magnificent Ambersons won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1919, the prize's second year. It is the middle book of Tarkington's Growth trilogy, between The Turmoil and The Midlander, his study of the industrial city devouring the town that preceded it, and Van Wyck Brooks called it perhaps his best novel and a permanent page in the social history of the United States.
Booth Tarkington was then about as famous as an American novelist could be, and his subsequent eclipse was correspondingly steep; he is read now mostly through this book, Alice Adams and the Penrod stories.
Orson Welles filmed it in 1942 as his follow up to Citizen Kane, and RKO cut roughly forty minutes and reshot the ending while Welles was out of the country, a mutilation that is itself one of Hollywood's most famous stories. Even in the studio's version it is regularly ranked among the best American films, and the search for the lost footage has never entirely stopped.