Editing Booth Tarkington (section)

==Legacy==
In the 1910s and 1920s, Tarkington was regarded as "the most important and lasting writer of his generation",<ref name="woodless">{{cite journal |last1=Woodress |first1=James |title=The Tarkington Papers |journal=The Princeton University Library Chronicle |date=November 12, 2023 |volume=XVI |issue=Winter 1955 Number 2 |pages=45–53 |doi=10.2307/26402872 |jstor=26402872 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26402872 |access-date=20 August 2023}}</ref> perhaps as important as [[Mark Twain]]. His works were reprinted many times, were often on best-seller lists, won many prizes, and were adapted into other media. ''Penrod'' and its two sequels were regular birthday presents for bookish boys.{{Citation needed|reason=statement\paragraph should be supported by citation to a reliable source.|date=August 2023}}

By the later twentieth century, however, he was ignored in academia: no congresses, no society, no journal of ''Tarkington Studies.''{{Citation needed|reason=statement should be supported by citation to a reliable source.|date=August 2023}} In 1981, The Avenue (Penguin) Companion to English and American Literature described him as "the epitome of the middle-brow American novelist."<ref name="avenel" /> In 1985, he was cited as an example of the great discrepancy possible between an author's fame when alive and oblivion later. According to this view, if an author succeeds at pleasing his or her contemporaries—and Tarkington's works have not a whiff of social criticism—he or she is not going to please later readers of inevitably different values and concerns.<ref>{{cite book
|title=A Study of "Don Quixote"
|first=Daniel
|last=Eisenberg
|year=1985
|publisher=Juan de la Cuesta 
|isbn=0936388315
|page=178}}</ref>

In 2004, author and critic [[Thomas Mallon]] noted: "Entirely absent from most current histories of American writing, Tarkington was generally scorned by those published just before or after his death."<ref>{{cite web |last1=Mallon |first1=Thomas |title=Hoosiers: The Lost World of Booth Tarkington. May 2004. |url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/hoosiers/302943/ |website=The Atlantic |date=May 2004 |access-date=17 August 2023}}</ref>

In 2019, [[Robert Gottlieb]] wrote that Tarkington "dwindled into America's most distinguished hack." Gottlieb criticized Tarkington's [[Anti-modernization|anti-modernist]] perspective, "his deeply rooted, unappeasable need to look longingly backward, an impulse that goes beyond nostalgia," for preventing him from "producing so little of real substance."<ref name="newyorker"/>

Mallon wrote of Tarkington that "only general ignorance of his work has kept him from being pressed into contemporary service as a literary [[environmentalist]]—not just a 'conservationist,' in the {{bracket|[[Theodore Roosevelt]]}} mode, but an emerald-Green decrier of internal combustion":

<blockquote>The automobile, whose production was centered in Indianapolis before World War I, became the snorting, belching villain that, along with soft coal, laid waste to Tarkington's Edens. His objections to the auto were aesthetic—in ''The Midlander'' (1923) automobiles sweep away the more beautifully named "[[Phaeton (carriage)|phaetons]]" and "surreys"—but also something far beyond that. [[Theodore Dreiser|Dreiser]], his exact Indiana contemporary, might look at the [[Ford Model T|Model T]] and see wage slaves in need of unions and sit-down strikes; Tarkington saw pollution, and a filthy tampering with human nature itself. "No one could have dreamed that our town was to be utterly destroyed," he wrote in ''The World Does Move''. His important novels are all marked by the soul-killing effects of smoke and asphalt and speed, and even in ''Seventeen'', Willie Baxter fantasizes about winning Miss Pratt by the rescue of precious little Flopit from an automobile's rushing wheels.<ref>{{cite magazine|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2004/05/mallon.htm|title=Hoosiers: The Lost World of Booth Tarkington|last=Mallon|first=Thomas|author-link=Thomas Mallon|date=May 2004|magazine=[[The Atlantic]]|access-date=December 30, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100522075023/https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2004/05/mallon.htm |archive-date=May 22, 2010 |via=[[Wayback Machine]]}}</ref></blockquote>

In June 2019, the [[Library of America]] published ''Booth Tarkington: Novels & Stories'', collecting ''The Magnificent Ambersons'', ''Alice Adams'', and ''In the Arena: Stories of Political Life''.