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1922: Alice Adams

1922 Alice Adams   by  Booth Tarkington 264 pages  Summary  Booth Tarkington won both the second and fifth Pulitzers ever awarded (see Entry #2, 1919: The Magnificent Ambersons ). Once again, this story examines the interplay of class, ambition, and personal happiness at just the right moment, when rapid changes were transforming choices for young people. Critics have said that this book verges on being a morality play because it carries such a strong message. However, the broad appeal of this book is evident in the successful movie adaptation. Alice Adams is the daughter of a modest Indiana business man. She is a likely candidate to attend the local secretarial school, but she disdains the idea of work. Alice and her mother harbor ambitions that cause them to act grander than the family really is. In contrast, Alice's brother goes to the other extreme. He flaunts his disregard for hypocritical conventions and keeps very low company . Alice sets her sights on...
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1927 Early Autumn

1927 Early Autumn Louis Bromfield  339 pages  Summary  The Pentlands, a snobby Massachusetts family, persist in their WASPy ways even as neighboring families die out and are replaced by nouveau riche social climbers. Pentland Manor is ruled by the ferociously etiquette-bound Aunt Cassie. Cassie runs the house in place of her sister-in-law, who is mysteriously housed in one wing of the grand house with a debilitating mental illness and a nurse to tend her. Cassie's brother, John, is the titular head of the family, but he spends his days playing bridge with a female friend of his wife. John's son Anson, the up-and-coming heir of the family, has married a lowly Scots-Irish girl named Olivia, much to the family's grave disappointment. The mismatched couple has one son who is always ill. A breath of fresh air arrives in the form of the Pentland daughter, Sybil, who is returning from school in Paris. A cousin Sabine, also lately from Europe, joins the family. These two free-thi...
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1923 One of Ours

  1923 One of Ours by Willa Cather 459 pages  Summary Cather was skewered by Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway for including romantic conventions in a novel set in World War I.  However, one unique strength of this book is Cather's (heretical) opinion that the European war was a freeing experience for some Americans; it was not just an unrelenting horror.  I personally find Cather's writing to be uneven. She insists on writing from the male perspective--and doesn't do so convincingly. But she is correct in observing that World War I  (as costly as it was to the nation and to individuals) did help Americans see beyond their own borders.    In this novel, a young man from a Nebraska farm, Claude Wheeler, is sent to a Christian college by his parents. There he befriends a fun-loving, free-thinking family, the Ehrlichs. He is called home to help with the family farm, and marries a childhood friend. His wife values Christian and political work over th...
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