Library of Indiana classics

Set in the early 19th century in the Ohio Territory, this is the story of a farm family. Leafy Rivers, whose first baby is on the way, recalls the past. Her recollections reveal the crisis in her marriage, and the difficult birth alters the relationship between husband and wife.

Alice Adams is Booth Tarkington’s second novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, just three years after his novel The Magnificent Ambersons won it. The novel tells the story of Alice, a Midwestern girl who grows up in a lower-middle-class family just after World War I. Alice meets a wealthy young man and tries to win his affection, despite her lower-class upbringing. Alice Adams was twice adapted for film, with the second adaptation starring Katherine Hepburn and earning a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

There is no boredom (not even an invalid's) comparable to that of a boy who has nothing to do...writes the great Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Booth Tarkington in his book "Penrod and Sam." When adults of the parental kind have plans and chores and schedules, an 11-year-old boy's life is dull and unexciting. But when these boys have opportunities for dubious experiments or neighborhood skirmishes with other children or travels of discovery, adults pull back on the reins and check any impulsive advances. And yet Penrod Schofield and Sam Williams are still able to prove their inventiveness and ability to sustain any exploit that may have tantalizing results. Such situations include rescuing an old and hard-worked horse, chasing black snakes, feigning sickness to avoid school, and saving an unsympathetic cat from drowning. Thinking they're going to find out their children's feelings and activities, parents ask politely vague questions and get nonreflective one-syllable answers. Then when grownups ask more direct questions intended for investigation of specific events, young boys mutter and evade as if deaf. Tarkington's talent for describing circumstances from a boy's perspective almost makes this book a manual that defines a youngster's responses to his confusing and bewildering existence.