The Plutocrat

Although his first book was about English romance, Newton Booth Tarkington, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams, came to be known for his comical (and almost cynical) style of the Lost Generation that characterized the 1920's. The book begins: Out of the north Atlantic a January storm came down in the night, sweeping the American coast with wind and snow and sleet upon a great oblique front from Nova Scotia to the Delaware capes. The land was storm-bound and the sea possessed with such confusion that nothing seemed less plausible than that human beings should be out among the running hill ranges, and not only alive but still voyaging crazily on their way. Tow ropes parted off the Maine and Massachusetts coasts; barges were swamped and bargemen drowned; schooners drove ashore in half-frozen harbours; and all night on the Georgian Banks fishermen fought dark monstrosities of water. But in the whole area of the storm nowhere was the northeaster more outrageous than upon that ocean path where flopped and shuttled the great Duumvir, five hours outward bound from New York.


Genre: Literary Fiction