The Turmoil

In a midland city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke, James Sheridan has built a great fortune and worships a single word — Bigness. To him, bigness is money, and money is honour, patriotism, love, and life; a man who does not burn to grow rich and grow large is simply not well. Two of his sons are made in his image. The third and youngest, Bibbs, is not: frail and dreamy, happiest with a book and a notebook of his own verses, he is the despair of a father who has no use for a son who would rather make something beautiful than make a dollar.

When tragedy forces the question, Sheridan sets out to break his strange son to the family creed, putting Bibbs to brutal labour in the machine-shop. Next door, in a proud old house being slowly devalued by the Sheridans’ new mansion, lives Mary Vertrees — the last daughter of a fading family with good blood and no money. The watchful love that grows between Bibbs and Mary becomes the still centre of the book, and through her, and against his father, Bibbs must decide what a life is for.

First published in 1915, The Turmoil is the opening novel of Tarkington’s Growth trilogy — the prelude to the Pulitzer Prize–winning Magnificent Ambersons — and one of the first great American novels to put the gospel of growth on trial. It is at once a vivid portrait of a booming industrial city, a charged drama of father against son, and an unflinching question about what a nation gains, and what it pays, when bigness becomes its highest good.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.