Novelist/dramatist/short-story writer Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) has been one of the best-represented American authors in film and television adaptations, with some 70 movie scripts and teleplays developed from his works. An unabashed champion of Americana, Tarkington set many of his stories in his native Indiana. He often focused on middle-class life and its susceptibility to the corrupting power of wealth, and is best-remembered for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons, published in 1918, and Alice Adams, published in 1922. Both were turned into well-regarded films, the former in 1942 and the latter in 1935.

Newton Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis and named after his maternal uncle Newton Booth, then governor of California. Tarkington had his secondary education at an Indianapolis High School and Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire before attending Purdue and Princeton. Although he never earned an official degree, both universities later awarded him honorary degrees, as did Columbia University. Tarkington's first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana, was published in 1899. Following in 1900 was Monsieur Beaucaire, later adapted as a play, an operetta and two movies -- one starring Rudolph Valentino (1924) and the other Bob Hope (1946)! During the period 1914 and 1929, Tarkington wrote a series of books about mischievous pre-World War I American youth -- Penrod, Penrod and Sam and Penrod Jashber -- that were compared to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.

The Penrod stories formed the basis for more than a dozen movies including a series of comedy shorts starring Billy Hayes and three versions of Penrod and Sam, released in 1923, 1931 and 1937. The '37 Penrod and Sam stars Billy Mauch and tells of Penrod's adventures with his gang of crime-fighting buddies as they tangle with bank robbers. Mauch appeared in two sequels, Penrod and His Twin Brother (1938) and Penrod's Double Trouble (1938). The Penrod stories were also the inspiration for two Doris Day musicals, On Moonlight Bay (1951) and By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953). Alice Adams, the story of an affected but endearing small-town social climber who wants to mix with "the better people," was filmed in 1923 with Florence Vidor as Alice and in 1935 with Katharine Hepburn in the role. The Hepburn version was directed by George Stevens with such an eye for atmosphere and sympathy for the leading character that it won Oscar® nominations as Best Picture and for Hepburn as Best Actress. It was also that rarity for Hepburn in the 1930s -- a box-office hit.

Little Orvie (1940) stars Johnny Sheffield, best known as "Boy" in the Tarzan movies, in Tarkington's story of a lad who finds a stray dog but keeps his new pet a secret from his strict father (Ernest Truex). Tarkington's Father's Son, filmed previously in 1931, was remade in 1941. The remake features John Litel and Billy Dawson in the story of a boy who fakes his own kidnapping to keep his parents from getting divorced.

Orson Welles, in his follow-up to Citizen Kane (1941), adapted and directed The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Tarkington's novel about a well-to-do and tempestuous family in turn-of-the-century Indianapolis. Although drastically cut without Welles' cooperation by its studio, RKO, the film remains a striking example of the director's virtuoso style. Presenting Lily Mars (1943), a black-and-white Judy Garland musical based on a Tarkington novel, presents the star as a small-town performer hoping for stardom on Broadway, with Van Heflin as a smitten producer who helps her realize her dreams.

Divorced from first wife Laurel Fletcher, with whom he had a daughter, Tarkington married Susanah Keifer Robinson in 1912. Blind in his later years, he continued producing works by dictating to a secretary. The novel he was working on when he died, The Show Piece, was published in incomplete form in 1947.

by Roger Fristoe