Booth Tarkington

Newton Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) was an American novelist and dramatist from Indianapolis, whose Midwestern settings and gentle humor made him a widely read writer in his day. After studying at Purdue and Princeton, he had his first success with The Gentleman from Indiana (1899) and Monsieur Beaucaire. His comic novels of boyhood and adolescence, Penrod and Seventeen, reached a huge audience, and his novels of a changing industrial city, The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams, each won the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote plays and served one term in the Indiana legislature.