The conflict between George and Eugene will eventually bring down the entire Amberson family and bring irrevocable change to their world.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1919 for this book, Booth Tarkington was an incredibly popular writer who authored many bestsellers of his day. George Amberson Minafer has grown up knowing the importance of his place as the heir to the wealthy and prominent Ambersons, and it has left him spoiled, arrogant and obsessed with his "name." But the end of the nineteenth century brings some devastating changes, embodied by Eugene Morgan, a former suitor of George's mother who has become an inventor of the hot new technology, automobiles. Read moreĪ classic novel describing the downfall of a nineteenth-century American family, which serves as a metaphor for the rapid disappearance of agrarian small-town America at the hands of twentieth-century industrialization and sprawl. An exciting chronicle of one family's accumulation of wealth and subsequent downfall, the book also paints a fascinating portrait of the forces that shaped modern American society. Almost overnight the prestige of the Ambersons irreversibly changes as well. Definitions of ambition, success, and loyalty are also changing. George Amberson Minafer, the arrogant heir to the family's wealth, illustrates the corrupting influence of greed and materialism at a time when the swiftly turning wheels of industry and commerce are overtaking old ways.
Set in a fictional Midwestern town during the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - the epic story follows the Ambersons' downward spiraling fortunes during a period of rapid industrialization and socio-economic change in America.
" a typical story of an American family and town the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city."Īwarded the Pulitzer Prize after it was first published in 1918, Tarkington's powerful social commentary traces America's economic growth through the declining fortunes of three generations of the successful and socially prominent Amberson family. " The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington's best novel," wrote critic Van Wyck Brooks.
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