The Magnificent Ambersons
by Booth Tarkington
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Windows Vista / XP / 2000, Mac OS X, Sony Reader Features
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Windows Vista / XP / 2000, Mac OS X, Sony Reader Features
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Windows 98+, Tablet PC, Pocket PC 2003 Features
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Platforms
Windows 98+, Tablet PC, Pocket PC 2003 Features
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Platforms
Windows 98+, Tablet PC, Pocket PC 2003 Features
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Availability:
Download Now Price: $13.95
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Windows PC, Palm, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, SymbianOS, Blackberry, iLiad, eBookMan, and more. Features
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Platforms
Windows PC, Palm, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, SymbianOS, Blackberry, iLiad, eBookMan, and more. Features
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All Palm & Pocket PC handheld devices plus all Windows and Macintosh computers. Features
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The Magnificent Ambersons Summary
| This 1919 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the well-heeled Amberson family details their descent from a position in the moneyed aristocracy to the realms of the working class. The protagonist, George Amberson Minafer, was coddled by his parents and grandparents who excused his purposeful indiscretions and refused him nothing. He grew up arrogant and demanding, assured of inheriting the executive duties of his grandfather's business. Yet he had no interest in the management of those responsibilities, and any professional ambition to become the director of the financial affairs was not his desire. His only intent was to spend the rest of his life as a constituent of the idle rich. But while he attempted to maintain his prestige and possessions, his life could not remain static. Around him small towns became cities during the Industrial Revolution, real estate developers turned the land into factories and manufacturing empires that paralleled the upswing of commercial endeavor. Tarkington wanted to convince the reader that even though technological change hadn't necessarily made life better, it also hadn't made it worse. George and his family viewed this situation as loss but others saw opportunity in it. Still, George could bring himself to recognize the fact that he and his relatives had become unconnected to the zealous growth of the United States. When George's grandfather died he understood too late how the acquisition of material goods was a worthless lifetime pursuit. So the Ambersons discovered that their investments had been exhausted as the industrial trends slowly but certainly drove them out of the city. |
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class. Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known through the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but as the critic Stanley Kauffmann noted, "It is high time that [the novel] appear again, to stand outside the force of Welles's genius, confident in its own right."
"The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington's best novel... [It is] a typical story of an American family and town -- the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city. This novel no doubt was a permanent page in the social history of the United States, so admirably conceived and written was the tale of the Amber-sons, their house, their fate and the growth of the community in which they were submerged in the end." VAN WYCK BROOKS
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' The Magnificent Ambersons |
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| This 1919 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the well-heeled Amberson family details their descent from a position in the moneyed aristocracy to the realms of the working class. The protagonist, George Amberson Minafer, was coddled by his parents and grandparents who excused his purposeful indiscretions and refused him nothing. He grew up arrogant and demanding, assured of inheriting the executive duties of his grandfather's business. Yet he had no interest in the management of those responsibilities, and any professional ambition to become the director of the financial affairs was not his desire. His only intent was to spend the rest of his life as a constituent of the idle rich. But while he attempted to maintain his prestige and possessions, his life could not remain static. Around him small towns became cities during the Industrial Revolution, real estate developers turned the land into factories and manufacturing empires that paralleled the upswing of commercial endeavor. Tarkington wanted to convince the reader that even though technological change hadn't necessarily made life better, it also hadn't made it worse. George and his family viewed this situation as loss but others saw opportunity in it. Still, George could bring himself to recognize the fact that he and his relatives had become unconnected to the zealous growth of the United States. When George's grandfather died he understood too late how the acquisition of material goods was a worthless lifetime pursuit. So the Ambersons discovered that their investments had been exhausted as the industrial trends slowly but certainly drove them out of the city. |
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class. Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known through the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but as the critic Stanley Kauffmann noted, "It is high time that [the novel] appear again, to stand outside the force of Welles's genius, confident in its own right." "The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington's best novel," judged Van Wyck Brooks. "[It is] a typical story of an American family and town--the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city. This novel no doubt was a permanent page in the social history of the United States, so admirably conceived and written was the tale of the Amber-sons, their house, their fate and the growth of the community in which they were submerged in the end." Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), a prolific writer who achieved overnight success with his first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), is perhaps best remembered as the author of the popular Penrod adventures and Seventeen (1916). He was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize for the novel Alice Adams (1921). |
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| Set in Midwest America in the early twentieth century, this bestselling novel introduces the extravagantly rich Ambersons, whose only real problem is that George Amberson Minafer?the spoiled grandson of the family patriarch?refuses to acknowledge the rising wealth and prestige of business tycoons, industrialists, and real-estate developers. Rather than join the modern age, George insists on remaining a "gentleman." But his town soon becomes a city, and the family palace becomes surrounded by industry, destroying the elegant, cloistered lifestyle enjoyed by the family in years gone by. This brilliant portrayal of social change in America is a timeless literary masterpiece. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press. |
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