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Contemporary American Novelists 1900-1920
Contemporary American Novelists 19001920 Author:Carl Van Doren Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ART 1. Booth Tarkington Booth Tarkington is the glass of adolescence and the mold of Indiana. The hero of his earliest novel, Harkless in The ... more »Gentleman from Indiana, drifts through that narrative with a melancholy stride because he has been seven long years out of college and has not yet set the prairie on fire. But Mr. Tarking- ". nt the time of writing distant from Princeton by i'r.; ij Su.t j'Miab1 r of ycnrn an' also !'. .. ;,, co'd "it ; ul i.;i ".! f.i'.i:n !n a htr . ".i.. bs -!jii/s ai H ulie i.f li'i' spi,' ''". - County idolizes him, evil-doer ha him, ' ful old men worship him, devoted young men simdow his unsuspecting steps at night in order to protect him from the villains of Six-Cross-Roads, sweet girls adore him, fortune saves him from dire adventures, and in the end his fellow-voters choose him to represent their innumerable virtues in the Congress of their country without his even dreaming what affectionate game they are at. This from the creator of Penrod, who at the comical age of twelve so often lays large plans for proving to the heedless world that he, too, has been ahero all along! In somewhat happier hours Mr. Tarkington wrote Monsieur Beaucaire, that dainty romantic episode in the life of Prince Louis-Philippe de Valois, who masquerades as a barber and then as a gambler at Bath, is misjudged on the evidence of his own disguises, just escapes catastrophe, and in the end gracefully forgives the gentlemen and ladies who have been wrong, parting with an exquisite gesture from Lady Mary Carlisle, the beauty of Bath,, who loves him but who for a few fatal days had doubted. This from the creator of William Sylvanus Baxter, who at the preposterous age of seventeen imagines himself another Sydney Carton and after a silent, agonizing, conde...« less