The Magnificent Ambersons

In the years after the Civil War, Major Amberson makes a fortune and builds the grandest house in a prosperous Midwestern town, and for a generation the Amberson name stands for everything fine. At the centre of the family’s pride is the Major’s grandson, George Amberson Minafer — handsome, arrogant, idolised by his mother, Isabel, and certain the world was made to defer to him. The townspeople, who cannot abide his insolence, console themselves with one shared wish: that someday this boy will get his comeuppance.

Into the family’s world comes Eugene Morgan, a widower with a level-headed daughter, Lucy, and a passion for a strange new machine — the automobile. Years before, Eugene had courted Isabel and lost her; now, returned to town, he begins to build the horseless carriages that will remake the country, and to court the widowed Isabel again. George loves Lucy — and when he comes to suspect the renewed bond between his mother and her father, his pride drives him to destroy it, at a cost he cannot yet imagine.

As the town swells into a smoky industrial city around the fading Amberson mansion, the family’s wealth and prestige drain away, and George is brought at last to the comeuppance the whole town had prayed for — and to something it never foresaw. First published in 1918 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Magnificent Ambersons is one of the great American novels of social change: a portrait of old money displaced by new, of progress and its costs, and of pride broken and almost redeemed. It later became the basis of Orson Welles’s celebrated 1942 film.

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.