Alice Adams, Volume 15

Front Cover
General Books LLC, 2009 - Fiction - 182 pages
This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1922. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XII The fine old gentleman revealed when she opened the door was probably the last great merchant in America to wear the chin beard. White as white frost, it was trimmed short with exquisite precision, while his upper lip and the lower expanses of his cheeks were clean and rosy from fresh shaving. With this trim white chin beard, the white waistcoat, the white tie, the suit of fine gray cloth, the broad and brilliantly polished black shoes, and the wide-brimmed gray felt hat, here was a man who had found his style in the seventies of the last century, and thenceforth kept it. Files of old magazines of that period might show him, in woodcut, as, "Type of Boston Merchant"; Nast might have drawn him as an honest statesman. He was eighty, hale and sturdy, not aged; and his quick blue eyes, still unflecked, and as brisk as a boy's, saw everything. "Well, well, well!" he said, heartily. "You haven't lost any of your good looks since last week, I see, Miss Alice, so I guess I'm to take it you haven't been worrying over your daddy. The young feller's getting along all right, is he?" "He's much better; he's sitting up, Mr. Lamb. Won't you come in?" "Well, I don't know but I might." He turned to call toward twin disks of light at the curb, "Be out in a minute, Billy"; and the silhouette of a chauffeur standing beside a car could be seen to salute in response, as the old gentleman stepped into the hall. "You don't suppose your daddy's receiving callers yet, is he?" "He's a good deal stronger than he was when you were here last week, but I'm afraid he's not very presentable, though." "'Presentable?'" The old man echoed her jovially. "Pshaw! I've seen lots of sick folks. I know what they look like and how they love to kind of nest in among a pile of old blankets and ...

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About the author (2009)

Newton Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on July 29, 1869. By the age of sixteen he had written a fourteen-act melodrama about Jesse James. Tarkington was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, then spent his first two years of college at Purdue, and his last two at Princeton. He was a founder of the Triangle Club, and editor of the Nassau Literary Magazine, a contributor of humorous drawings and literary wit to The Tiger. When his class graduated in 1893, he lacked sufficient credits for a degree. His later achievements, however, won him an honorary A.M. in 1899 and an honorary Litt.D. in 1918. Upon leaving Princeton in 1893 he returned to Indiana determined to pursue a career as a writer. Tarkington was an early member of The Dramatic Club, founded in 1889, and often wrote plays and directed and acted in its productions. After a five-year apprenticeship full of publishers' rejection slips, Tarkington enjoyed a huge commercial success with The Gentleman from Indiana, published in 1899. He cemented his fame with Monsieur Beaucaire, published in 1900, a historical romance later adapted into a movie starring Rudolph Valentino. The political knowledge Tarkington acquired while serving one term in the Indiana house of representatives formed In the Arena, a collection of short stories that drew praise from President Theodore Roosevelt for its realism. In collaboration with dramatist Harry Leon Wilson, Tarkington wrote The Man from Home, the first of many successful Broadway plays. Following a decade in Europe, Tarkington returned to Indianapolis and won a new readership with the publication of The Flirt, the first of his novels to be serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. Equally successful was Seventeen, a nostalgic comedy of adolescence that subsequently inspired a play, two Broadway musicals, and a pair of film adaptations as well as Tarkington's sequel novel Gentle Julia. Tarkington broke new artistic ground with The Turmoil in 1915, the first novel in his so-called Growth trilogy. The Magnificent Ambersons, the second work in the series, earned Tarkington the Pulitzer Prize. His work Alice Adams also won the Pulitzer in 1921. Tarkington produced a total of 171 short stories, 21 novels, 9 novellas, and 19 plays along with a number of movie scripts, radio dramas, and even illustrations over the course of a career that lasted from 1899 until his death in 1946. Cataracts gradually diminished his sight, and in 1930 he went completely blind. Surgeries successfully returned a part of his vision a year later, but his vitality was diminished. He turned primarily to children's stories in the final phase of his career, while also becoming a significant collector of art. He died in 1946 after an illness.

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