The magnificent ambersons how many pages

Sinclair Lewis. William Faulkner. England Made Me. Graham Greene. The Wild Palms. The Man Who Loved Children. Christina Stead. Toni Morrison. John Updike.

The Song of the Lark. Frank Norris. Herman Melville. The Town. My Antonia. The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton. A Posthumous Confession. After a five-year apprenticeship marked by publishers' rejection slips, Tarkington enjoyed a huge commercial success with The Gentleman from Indiana , a novel credited with capturing the essence of the American heartland.

He consolidated his fame with Monsieur Beaucaire , a historical romance later adapted into a movie starring Rudolph Valentino. His comedy Clarence , which Alexander Woollcott praised for being 'as American as Huckleberry Finn or pumpkin pie,' helped launch Alfred Lunt on a distinguished career and provided Helen Hayes with an early successful role.

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, the book contained authentic characters and themes that paved the way for Penrod , a group of tales drawn from the author's boyhood memories of growing up in Indiana. The adventures of Penrod Schofield, which Tarkington also chronicled in the sequels Penrod and Sam and Penrod Jashber , seized the imagination of young adult readers and invited comparison with Tom Sawyer.

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 , the first novel in his so-called Growth trilogy documenting the changes in urban life during the era of America's industrial expansion.

William Dean Howells, the father of American realism, praised Tarkington's vivid depiction of the human misery generated by one man's worship of bigness and materialism. The Magnificent Ambersons , the second work in the series, earned Tarkington the Pulitzer Prize. For some reason, she's attracted to George despite the fact that nearly every word he says is off-putting. These sections of the novel are among the most fun.

The dialogue between George and Lucy is often hilarious because Lucy never takes to heart George's attempts at domination, his bad humor nor his arrogance. At the same time, Eugene and Isabel start seeing each other again after George's father dies and George is appalled when they become engaged. He puts a stop to it in a cruel fashion and Isabel goes along with it.

Isabel allows herself to give up Eugene at George's insistence due to his caring too much for appearances and how it would look if she remarried. Isabel says to George, " I shouldn't mind anything if I have you all to myself. George knows that by forcing his mother to give up Eugene that he has lost any chance at love with Lucy, so George and Isabel leave for Europe for 3 years and in that time their town is transformed.

The small town speeds up and spreads out leading to faster cars, urbanization, decaying neighborhoods, industrial growth, pollution and declining fortunes. When Isabel and George return from Europe the transformations are complete. This includes the rise of Eugene Morgan who is now wealthy and the once-mocked horseless carriage is the coveted automobile while the Amberson district goes downhill.

I will say no more so as not to spoil the story as it proceeds from here. A wonderful novel which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in Highly recommended. View all 33 comments. The people who have done the most in contempt of other people's opinion, and who consider themselves the highest above it, have been the most furious if it went against them.

Arrogant and domineering people can't stand the least, lightest, faintest breath of criticism. It just kills them".

Now admit it, you got a mental picture of a certain man currently in the news, a man we've all had just about enough of in "In all my life, the most arrogant people that I've known have been the most sensitive.

Now admit it, you got a mental picture of a certain man currently in the news, a man we've all had just about enough of in the last 4 years, didn't you? This book was written more than a hundred years ago, and won the Pulitzer Prize in So either Booth Tarkington had a crystal ball, or this type of person has been around for all of history.

George Amberson Minafer was born with a spoon in his mouth, and his adoring mother and grandfather used that spoon to feed him the belief that he was the most wonderful person ever born, he could do no wrong, and everything he did and said was just perfect.

The people of the town were just waiting for the day when George "gets his comeuppance". The beauty of this book for me was that George did get his comeuppance in the end, and the journey was long and painful.

He is taken down by life, as is everyone in the end. As well as being a satisfying family saga, this book shone an historical light on the early years of the 20th century, with the invention of the automobile and the growth of small villages into sprawling cities, hints at coming pollution, and the downfall of the American spirit when profits and making money took the place of the old ways of thrift and independence.

This was an old-fashioned novel in the best way, and I really enjoyed reading it at last. View all 17 comments. Jul 22, Evan rated it really liked it Shelves: pulitzer-prize , modern-library-toplist.

First and last pages are exquisite - as good as anything I've ever read. Middle section bogs down in some repetition and tedious dialogue as the world passes the Ambersons by and they fritter away their lives in clueless trivialities. Many readers will not be able to stand the uncompromising stubbornness of the spoiled Georgie Amberson Minafer. All in all, what a talent for description and grasp of the novel's time Tarkington has.

The style pulls you right along, simple yet not simplistic. T First and last pages are exquisite - as good as anything I've ever read. The subtitle of the book, written in , might have been "How the Automobile Effed up America" both the environment and the communal way of life.

Lots of prophecy in that. I'd always admired the film, but assumed due to RKO's infamous interference and cutting that the last part of the movie did not jibe with the book and was weak, but this turns out not to be true. After watching the movie I was astonished at the skill of Robert Wise and the RKO editors for managing to keep virtually the entire plot, key scenes and major dialogue exchanges from the book in the film.

Where the film is weak in comparison to the book is in conveying how Tarkington expresses the gradual financial, social, and personal downfall of the Ambersons, including their environs and their place as well-known pillars of the community. This takes place incrementally in the book, so that the reader is aware of the acidic decay taking place while the Ambersons seem clueless to it, but it is virtually unremarked in the film until the final minutes, where it is very abrupt and not fully explored in all its implications.

Welles gets the mood and plot right, but skimps somewhat on the thematic elements. Also, Tarkington's book makes you feel sorry for George Amberson Minafer when he does get his comeuppance, even though you've hated him throughout the book. I don't get that same sense in the film version. I also believe the "true to my own true love" quote at the end of the film which is the same as in the book is open to a different, and wrong, interpretation in the film.

I always thought that the film was implying that Eugene Morgan and Aunt Fannylooking dewey eyed at one anotherwere somehow going to thus hook up, which seems all wrong. In the book, it is clear that his "true love" remains the dead Isabelle Amberson Minafer.

By making peace with her son and Eugene's enemy George Amberson Minafer, he is thus remaining true to his own true love. The movie seems to twist this for the sake of a happy ending, though perhaps I misread that. Anyway, the film is no substitute for the book, but it is perfectly realized and cast, and both book and film amplify and enlighten aspects of each. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.

I am not sure. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us.

At the rear door of the car there was no platform, but a step where passengers clung in wet clumps when the weather was bad and the car crowded. The patrons--if not too absent-minded--put their fares into a slot; and no conductor paced the heaving floor, but the driver would rap remindingly with his elbow upon the glass of the door to his little open platform if the nickels and the passengers did not appear to coincide in number.

A lone mule drew the car, and sometimes drew it off the track, when the passengers would get out and push it on again. They really owed it courtesies like this, for the car was genially accommodating: a lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once and wait for her while she shut the window, put on her hat and cloak, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the "girl" what to have for dinner, and came forth from the house.

The previous passengers made little objection to such gallantry on the part of the car: they were wont to expect as much for themselves on like occasion. In good weather the mule pulled the car a mile in a little less than twenty minutes, unless the stops were too long; but when the trolley-car came, doing its mile in five minutes and better, it would wait for nobody.

Nor could its passengers have endured such a thing, because the faster they were carried the less time they had to spare! I've sat in the shop watching him try for several beautiful afternoons, while outside the windows all Nature was fragrant with spring and smoke.

He hums ragtime to himself as he tries, and I think his mind is wandering to something else less tedious--to some new invention in which he'd take more interest. No business plans which had ever absorbed him could compare in momentousness with the plans that absorbed him now, for he had to plan how to enter the unknown country where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson—not sure of anything, except that Isabel would help him if she could. His absorption produced the outward effect of reverie, but of course it was not.

The Major was occupied with the first really important matter that had taken his attention since he came home invalided, after the Gettysburg campaign, and went into business; and he realized that everything which had worried him or delighted him during this lifetime between then and to-day--all his buying and building and trading and banking--that it all was trifling and waste beside what concerned him now. And yet something had happened--a thing which, years ago, had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town.

They had thought of it, longed for it, hoping acutely that they might live to see the day when it would come to pass. And now it had happened at last: Georgie Minafer had got his come-upance.

He had got it three times filled and running over. The city had rolled over his heart, burying it under, as it rolled over the Major's and buried it under. The city had rolled over the Ambersons and buried them under to the last vestige; and it mattered little that George guessed easily enough that most of the five hundred Most Prominent had paid something substantial "to defray the cost of steel engraving, etc.

Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him. The Magnificent Ambersons transported me to a mid-western town in the early s at the dawn of the industrial age. As automobiles begin to appear, as soft black coal pollutes the avenues, the most prominent family in town the Ambersons are forced to change. The reader feels little sympathy for George or his mother.

George's mother is blinded by love for her son and creates a spoiled, self-centered boy and man. George for most of the novel is an unlikable combination of privilege, delusion The Magnificent Ambersons transported me to a mid-western town in the early s at the dawn of the industrial age.

George for most of the novel is an unlikable combination of privilege, delusion and snobbery. But I didn't need to like George to be riveted by his story. The ending is rushed and felt almost tacked on - otherwise I enjoyed every page of this novel - or rather every word - I listened to an excellent audio rendition by Geoffrey Blaisdell.

View all 11 comments. Not a memorable story. Descriptions were good but this one wasn't for me. He is a rude, spoilt, obnoxious and down right cruel child and matures into a uppity, self righteous and still over-indulged young adult. So, it was with this frustrated state of mind I energetically ploughed through this seemingly much underrated Pulitzer Prize Winner.

In fact, Tarkington is one of only two to have received the Pulitzer on two occasions. Applause please. The Ambersons represent the last vestiges of American old money. The result was the rise of the middle-class, a catalyst for a monumental wave of city building and urban sprawl, effectively changing the shape of the American landscape.

But rather than embracing the change and capitalising on new investment opportunities, the Ambersons, particularly George, remain stuck in their old ways, incapable of adapting to the changing world order, in complete denial. They are symbolic of a new rising class in America, where wealth is made by the man and not simply idly inherited through the family line. Against much mockery, Eugene adheres to his vision to invent the modern automobile, and proves himself, becoming a successful and wealthy entrepreneur.

When times are gone they're not old, they're dead! There aren't any times but new times! But luckily for George, Lucy in all her infinite optimism and wisdom recognises a chip of goodness somewhere!?

In fact, one could say I even started to feel some sympathetic warmth towards him as he starts to right some wrongs. However, this new America is far from perfect. Development, technology and economic prosperity as we know comes at a price. It makes our lives both better and worse at the same time.

And then the climb is necessarily hard and bitter, and hopefully we learn from the experience. The world is constantly changing, that rug, always being pulled from beneath us.

View all 4 comments. It was made in into a movie by Orson Wells his second film so it does have that anchor to keep it from slipping further into the darkness of the past. I guess old fiction is like old families. Great Caesar dead and turn'd to clay stopped no hole to keep the wind away; dead Caesar was nothing but tiresome bit of print in a book that schoolboys study for awhile and then forget.

Most books are eventually pulped. Even the good and many, many of the great ones too are soon forgotten. The writer's impulse is for some glimmer of immortality, but memories and readers are damn fickle things. We collectively shrug off and forget those we recently purchased, those banging the publisher's gongs to get attention, and to hell with all those public domain dead writers -- even if they did write such beautiful books.

View 2 comments. Diane, Leslie and I have shared our thoughts as we all read it at the same time. Secondly it draws a picture of a time and place - Midwestern America at the turn of the 20th Century. Industrialization, railroads, cars and new opportunities to make something of yourself even if you are not born into wealth.

Thirdly, by looking at George Amberson Minafer, the grandson of the town's most prominent citizen and its founder, we can observe the socio-economic repercussions of the era on a personal level. The wealthy, the renowned, the privileged, what happened to them with the changed times? The book was first published in Booth Tarkington shows that he was prescient of what was to come.

We see this through what some of the characters say. I am thinking of Eugene Morgan; he saw with foresight both the money that could be made through "horseless wagons" and the changes, both good and bad, that they would bring.

A word about character portrayals and family relationships. You could label this as a novel of the genre "dysfunctional families", here a dysfunctional family of the early s. What happens when a mother has only one child and she sacrifices all for him?

It's a boy, namely the above named George. At the beginning the characters feel two-dimensional. Personification rather flat, but pay attention. Watch what is happening. At the start George is pampered, arrogant, over-bearing, domineering, despicable in all respects. Will he change? Will he get his comeuppance? There is heavy foreshadowing. The book is easy to read and has little extraneous information.

The audiobook narration by Peter Berkrot is very good. He definitely does dramatize, but he does it well and in all the right places. It is easy to follow. Between times, though, he returned to Indianapolis, even from the beloved summer home of his later years in Kennebunkport, Me. In his gaudy younger days, in his mellow and intelligently socially-conscious middle life and in his contented old age he was a Hoosier.

Tarkington did not always write great books, but he always wrote good ones. Writing, for him, was a very serious business—fifteen and sixteen hour stretches in his study with his meals sent in.

Probably, as time goes on, it will be realized increasingly that the best of his efforts are important social documents, that the lightest of them have a Mark Twain quality of surviving freshness and that they are all good entertainment.

Tarkington was happy in his choice of male associates throughout his life. With women, however, he was less at home. He had the reputation at Princeton of being something of a wallflower in mixed company; perhaps those occasions furnished documentary material for the agonies of Willie Baxter and Ramsey Milholland.

His first wife was Laurel Louisa Fletcher, daughter of a highly successful Indianapolis banking family of whom recognizable portraits appear in Tarkington's writing. Their divorce was followed shortly and tragically by the death of their one daughter of pneumonia. His second wife, Susannah Robinson of Dayton, O. She was always interested in his writing and aided him in its continuance and development.

Tarkington's later years were plagued by ill health: by a heart ailment which brought orders to slow down and by an eye trouble which brought about almost complete blindness although he made every effort to conceal the fact.