The Magnificent Ambersons

“I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles," he said. "With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.” ~ Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons. 


Booth Tarkington’s 1919 novel The Magnificent Ambersons won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was the basis for the classic movie by Orson Welles, the original negative of which remains lost. The book's heart-shattering portrait of a wealthy family destroyed from within by psychological demons continues to haunt and enthrall each new generation. 


The novel traces the growth of the United States through the declining fortunes of three generations of the aristocratic Amberson family in an upper-scale Indianapolis neighborhood, between the end of the Civil War and the early part of the 20th century, a period of rapid industrialization and socio-economic change in America. The decline of the Ambersons is contrasted with the rising fortunes of industrial tycoons and other new-money families, who derived power not from family names but by "doing things." Young George Amberson Minafer, the patriarch’s grandson, is spoiled terribly by his mother Isabel. Growing up arrogant, sure of his own worth and position, and totally oblivious to the lives of others, George falls in love with Lucy Morgan, a young though sensible debutante. But there is a long history between George’s mother and Lucy’s father, of which George is unaware…