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Booth Tarkington

Newton Booth Tarkington (29 July 1869-19 May 1946) was an American author who served as a Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives from 1902 to 1903.

Biography[]

Newton Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on 29 July 1869, the nephew of California governor Newton Booth and a cousin of Chicago mayor James Hutchinson Woodworth. He befriended Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University, and he served as a conservative Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives from 1902 to 1903, supporting Prohibition and later opposing the New Deal. Inspired by his patrician upbringing, Tarkington wrote about a declining aristocratic family in The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and about a social climber in Alice Adams (1921), and he won several Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction. In the 1910s and 1920s, he was considered America's greatest living author. Tarkington later moved to Kennebunkport, Maine, but he died in his hometown of Indianapolis in 1946 at the age of 76.

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