The Magnificent Ambersons

What It's About

Set in an unnamed Midwestern town that swells into a smoky city between the 1870s and the early twentieth century, this novel follows the Ambersons, the wealthiest and most admired family in the place. At its centre is George Minafer, the pampered grandson of the family's patriarch, who grows up certain that the world owes him deference. His mother Isabel's old romance with Eugene Morgan, an inventor who returns to town with a new machine called the automobile, sets the personal and the social on a collision course. It is the middle volume of Tarkington's Growth trilogy, and it was adapted for film by Orson Welles in 1942.

Key Concepts

The central theme is the erosion of inherited status. The Ambersons assume their position is permanent, and the novel asks what happens when money and manners are no longer enough. Alongside this runs the clash between old and new: the automobile, industry and rapid urban growth transform the town's physical and social landscape, and Tarkington is ambivalent about whether this counts as progress. Pride, entitlement and the price of refusing to adapt drive much of the human drama. Critics have noted that the book mourns a vanishing gentility while exposing the complacency that helped end it. Some modern readers find its pace leisurely and its nostalgia for the old order a little indulgent.

About the Author

Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) was an American novelist and dramatist from Indianapolis, Indiana. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Purdue and Princeton, he was among the most popular and admired American writers of the early twentieth century, and one of only a handful of novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice. He also served a term in the Indiana House of Representatives, and his reputation faded considerably after his death.