Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificen
t Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American
dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George
Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the famil
y's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufac
turers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern arist
ocracy to the working class.
Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known thr
ough the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but as the critic Stanley Kauffmann noted, "It
is high time that [the novel] appear again, to stand outside the force of Welle
s's genius, confident in its own right."
"The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps
Tarkington's best novel," judged Van Wyck Brooks. "[It is] a typical story of a
n American family and town--the great family that locally ruled the roost and va
nished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city. This nove
l no doubt was a permanent page in the social history of the United States, so a
dmirably conceived and written was the tale of the Ambersons, their house, their
fate and the growth of the community in which they were submerged in the end."
