Alice Adams

By Booth Tarkington

The winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize in literature and the subject of several well-received film adaptations, Alice Adams is regarded as one of Booth Tarkington's most accomplished novels. The tale follows the exploits of the plucky young protagonist, who disregards her family's low social standing and pursues love with the well-heeled young man of her dreams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing
• Release date: May 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312048867

Booth Tarkington

Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) was an acclaimed American novelist and playwright. Born in Indiana, Tarkington drew inspiration from his Midwestern roots, weaving narratives that captured the complexities of American society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Reviews for Alice Adams

[pharmacdon · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story is set in a lower-middle-class household in an unnamed town in the Midwest shortly after World War I. The center of the story focuses on the young girl Alice Adams who tries to climb the social ladder and her flirtations with Arthur Russell who belongs to the upper class. But later on “She breathed more rapidly but knew that he could not have detected it, and she took some pride in herself for the way she had met this little crisis. But to have met it with such easy courage meant to her something more reassuring than a momentary pride in the serenity she had shown. For she found that what she had resolved in her inmost heart was now really true: she was "through with all that!”
This book won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1922.

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found myself alternately amused by, disgusted at and sorry for Alice Adams. Part of the aspects that bothered me about her character were due to the time and culture in which she lived (the book was published in 1921 so it was just after WW1). Alice is a romantic and somewhat silly 22-year-old girl whose whole goal in life (egged on by her snobbish and pushing mother) is to marry well - in her mind, in some romantic way swept off her feet by a handsome and rich man. The Adams are a middle class family uneasily teetering on the edge of a changing world; the mother continues to believe in the values and social mores of the 19th century in which she had been raised while the son Walter is a devotee of the Jazz Age just beginning. Between these two extremes are the father, who while more aware than his wife of the realities of their situation financially is ill and unaware of the social struggle the mother is so concerned with, and Alice who lives mostly in a fantasy world (based upon novels or movies is my guess although that is never even hinted at). I perhaps have more sympathy for Alice's shifts to maintain a "position in society" than other contemporary readers because she reminded me so much of certain Regency and Victorian heroines. Her efforts are quite pathetic but her belief in them is child-like. At times, this childish behaviour is endearing and at others annoying. Her mother's insistence on keeping up appearances seems to have created in Alice a feeling that appearance is all that is necessary to capture the right man. Sadly, by the time she realizes that a misleading appearance is bound to be discovered by an interested suitor, it is too late.I have seen the film based upon this book (starring a young Katherine Hepburn as Alice) so I was surprised by some of the events at the end of the book. Overall, while the film is a good adaptation, the book gives more complexity.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I can't believe this won a Pulitzer.This is not a deep read. The descriptions of black people and in working people in general are crude.Alice Adams in a young 20-something. She (and her mother) desperately want her to land a good (read: wealthy and/or important) husband. But since she was 16, fewer and fewer young men have come to call. She's grasping, and they are now looking for wives, not girls. And Alice's father is a department head. He's not a business owner, he's not wealthy. They have had to scramble to put Alice out there, meanwhile they have given her younger brother none of this and he is just going to take it.So, she is not a desirable wife for the "quality" husband she wants. In the end, mother and daughter (and father) see what must be done and start to settle into their proper places within society.Ugh.

[schmerguls · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I read this because it won the Pulitzer fiction prize for 1922. I found it insipid.

[mikedraper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's the turn of the 20th century in the industrialized midwest. Alice Adams is a young woman of age twenty-two. She's from a middle class family but has ambitons to rise up in society.The difficulty is that her family doesn't have the financial means to provide her with the necessities to compete with the other women she wants to impress. For the dance at her friend's home, she doesn't have a date and coerces her brother, Walter, to escourt her. She wears a dress that is already owned but her mother fixes it up by adding some lace to it. She can't afford flowers from a florist but goes out and picks violets and wears them, by the time the dance is held, the violets are withered and dead.The main theme of the novel is getting ahead in life, moving up in the financial and social hieracy that exists.Alice is reminiscent of Charlotte in "Gone With The Wind' in her attempts to get ahead in society. She also wants to capture the most eligible bachelor, even if that person is promised to another. Her father, Virgil, is a more sympathetic character. He seemed content in his life but is persuaded to give up his contentment and attempt to follow his wife's dream. She wants him to go after an invention that he was partly responsible for, even at the betrayal of his former employer and trusting friend.

[rosecityreader · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Grounded in outmoded attitudes about class and distractingly highlighted by outmoded attitudes about race, Alice Adams has not aged well. In his 1922 Pulitzer winner, Booth Tarkington presents a heroine striving to climb the short social ladder of her Midwestern city using only her charms and well-rehearsed mannerisms.Watching Alice struggle is painful. She has self-awareness sufficient to know she is doing things wrong, but lacks the tools to do them right. And it never seems that the game is worth the candle.Finally, after watching Alice dither for most of the book, circumstances force her to face reality and make some difficult but intelligent decisions. The book ends on a gloriously hopeful note, which is the most redeeming feature of the story. Also posted on Rose City Reader.

[pdebolt_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alice Adams is the story of a young woman from a family of modest means who yearns to "belong," as does her mother. Set in the 1920s, Alice's life is filled with, and defined by, an awareness of how she is perceived by her peers. As in the Magnificent Ambersons and Dreiser's An American Tragedy, life revolves around social status and we observe these pretentious struggles with embarassment and compassion. I wonder after reading this book how many people in the early 21st century still attempt to be part of a group that judges them by such shallow values and hope we have evolved into a more caring society.

[briantomlin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Left with the thought of the fluidity of the American middle class. People work hard to a certain point, then it can come crashing down. The great opportunities presented by our economy sometimes can be cruel because people are able to prop themselves up artificially. Today we do this with credit and mortgages and all sorts of devices, some of which was different in 1920, but the truth remains in this book because the characters try to pretend to be what they are not (in Alice's case) or they place social and financial gain above everything else (as in the ase of Alice's mother), and the book shows that these tactics will not work when they go against the truer desires of life (such as Alice's father).The work sets up an interesting paradox: with our culture steeped in romanticism, we don't believe in doing things against the true "spirit" of our desires, and yet in America so many of us go about reciting that we must sacrifice something to meet our goals and to look good in the eyes of others. The characters in this novel do not want to make that choice, they want both things simultaneously. The culture of the novel, which echoes American culture then and now, is that we are entitled to both.The books ends on a "realistic" note: mother and daughter find their situation reduced, reality sets in. Alice seems to have learned to accept who she is; this is the most powerful part of the story for me, having been in that kind of revelation several times (and still not sure that I have really accepted myself and all the realities of my life). I relate to these characters because something in me continues ti endure with the American fantasy that I can achieve both the freedom of American ideals and the success in materialism/business/commerce/consumerism. Look at from the point of view of Alice Adams, Perhaps I am foolish and doomed to some miserable fate. But some sort of optimism from...somewhere.. nonetheless permeates the book and my life. Maybe it is just refusal to look at reality that defies the impending gloom and doom. Do the Alices or the Brians ever success in such a quest?

[curls_99 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alice Adams is Booth Tarkington's second Pulitzer Prize novel. I thoroughly enjoyed Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, and so I looked forward to this read. While Alice Adams was interesting and another good commentary of the pretentiousness of society during the Victorian era, the story was too similar to The Magnificent Ambersons.Where The Magnificent Ambersons focused on a wealthy family who slowly began to loose their wealth and status and did everything they could to keep up appearances of wealth, Alice Adams is about a family who could not quite keep up with all of the wealthy families in town and did everything to appear that they could.It seems to me that there were many books written on this subject matter in the early 20th century. Feelings of disillusionment following World War I drove many authors to be highly critical of society prior to The Great War. What interests me is that this is something we are dealing with today. The skyrocketing numbers of foreclosures on homes is the result of people taking out loans that they can't afford so they can live somewhere that will make them look like they have more money than they do. People choose to spend their money on things like expensive cars or clothing instead of paying off ever-increasing credit card bills. Why? So they people who they probably don't like anyway will accept them. Aren't we humans interesting creatures?Read this book or any of the others, but don't judge their society too harshly unless you are willing to look at our own society in the same way.

[joycepa_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Alice Adams is a morality tale about a socially ambitious young woman and her family in a Midwestern city. The family is middle-class, and sliding down in the economic scale. The father has worked in the same job for 20 years and is content. The mother, ambitious for her children, bitterly blames the father for not having made more of himself, for not thinking of his children’s social futures and therefore not having any gumption to do better. Her entire life is focused on her children, especially Alice, being part of upper-class society. The mother is convinced that money and money alone will make the difference and constantly badgers the father to do better.Alice pours nearly all her energy into making a good “catch”. Quite popular a few years ago, the gentleman callers have vanished. Still, she practices gestures and facial expressions in front of the mirror, works hard at making over clothes (actually, dictating directions to her mother) to keep fashionable, spending all she can on accessories and clothes. She visits a well-to-do friend and basically worms her way into receiving invitations to society events.Her brother Walter is a bitter young man who hates the situation in which he finds himself, loathes the ‘swells’ that Alice courts so assiduously, and hangs around with a crowd that his mother in particular finds appalling.A new young man comes to town and is attracted to Alice, who goes all out to land him. But as we see increasingly in her dialogue with him, she misrepresents herself and her family and is terrified of what he will find out from his well-connected society relations.Meanwhile, her father, goaded beyond endurance by the nagging mother, decides to leave the firm for which he has worked and start a glue factory, using a formula that can be rightly said to belong to his former employer. The book has a double climax: a dinner party given by the mother for Alice’s young man and the outcome of the father’s business enterprise. There are no surprises here—in a morality tale, the outcomes are guaranteed. That wouldn’t be a problem if the book were as well written as The Magnificent Ambersons, but in my opinion, it isn’t. The Magnificent Ambersons was a complex story, enriched by Tarkington’s observations on the transformation of a small Midwestern town into an industrialized city and the social changes that accompanied the growth. Alice Adams has a much narrower focus, and while the writing at times is excellent—the description of the dinner party is superb—there is no tension to the story because the reader knows perfectly well how it has to end. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1922, it really suffers by comparison, both in plot, style, and excellence in writing by the previous winner, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. It’s a good read if your goal is to read the Pulitzer winners. Otherwise, I feel it’s not worth the effort.

[libraryscat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have read this book many times and loved it each time. Alice tries so hard to fit in with the upper crust and fails miserably. She is a very likable character in spite of her lies and manipulations.