The
Magnificent Ambersons
Booth Tarkington
1919 Winner
The
Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of
an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical
drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the
founder of the family's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers,
financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent
from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class.
The
Age
of Innocence
Edith Wharton
1921 Winner
Edith Wharton's works are concerned with failed romance and disappointed marriage; The Age of Innocence is no exception. Newland Archer, the main character of the story is a lawyer living in New York who is in love with a certain Ellen Olenska. Ellen is married to a Polish count but the two are separated, and she is of a slightly extravagant and artistic nature that is juxtaposed with the hesitant but single-minded ways of Newland's fiancée May. The love of Newland for the unusual and exciting Polish lady is destroyed by the surprisingly devious May's intervention. The American has on her side the acceptable ways of society and convention and as such we watch as Newland is dragged down into a marriage to May that is not in keeping with his true desires. Typically, the novel deals with Wharton's desire to expose the conflicts between conventional, convenient love and the true desires of the individual that are so often undermined by society itself.
Alice
Adams
Booth Tarkington
1922 Winner
The story of the disintegration of a lower middle-class family in a small Midwestern town, Alice Adams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for best novel in 1922. A social climber, the title character is ashamed of her unsuccessful family. Hoping to attract a wealthy husband, she lies about her background, but she is found out and is shunned by those whom she sought to attract. At the novel's end, she knows her chances for happiness and a successful marriage are bleak, but she remains unbowed.
ONE OF OURS
Willa Cather
1923 Winner
In One of Ours Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his birth. In doing so, she creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
THE ABLE McLAUGHLINS
Margaret Wilson
1924 Winner
SO BIG
Edna Farber
1925 Winner
An interesting story of a woman's life and her struggle to raise her only son and teach him what is valuable in life. The Story is set in the late 1800 and early 1900's in rural and urban Chicago. The author called it "a book about cabbages..." but really, it's a story about Selina DeJong, orphaned as a young, wealthy child, who struggles to make a life for herself and her only child Dirk whom she has nicknamed "sobig". She marries a dolt for a husband and begins to work on a farm. Her husband is a small man with a small brain and is afraid of his own shadow which limits and frustrates Selina and keeps her from accomplishing anything for many years. Fortunately, her husband suffers an accidental death and she is fianlly able to make some necessary improvements which allow her son (who otherwise would have been a cabbage farmer his whole life) to attend college in the city. He succeeds in college, but when he gets out he sacrifices his dream profession (architecture) to make a lot of money doing something boring in finance, and in doing so, he misses the point his mother tried to teach him about success.
Arrowsmith
Sinclair Lewis
1926 Winner
Martin Arrowsmith begins as a medical student who later opens his own
EARLY AUTUMN
Louis Bromfield
1927 Winner
The
Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder
1928 Winner
A bridge collapses in eighteenth-century Peru; five die. Who were they? In the answer to that question lie numerous cosmic ironies, which are related in a melancholy narrative of great power, simplicity and beauty. The character of Brother Juniper is witness to this catastrophe and decides to find out if it is simply an accident of punishment from God. The detail of the characters and their lives are phenomenal and the characters themselves will be imprinted into the back of your mind for days.
Strange
Interlude
Eugene O'Neil
1928 Winner
"Strange Interlude" is a family chronicle, of
sorts, following the life of Nina Leeds and her family in a small university
town in New England - from her early days as a young woman mourning the loss of
her ideal lover during WWI, through her middle age years. It is the story of a
family's secret and their determination to keep this secret unknown by others,
and sometimes even to themselves. The play's most unusual quality, though, is
found in the words that each character speaks. Not only do they converse with
each other using naturalistic dialogue, but they also voice their subtext, which
is unheard by the other characters in the play, but is heard by the audience.
This device brings to the surface the secret life that each character in the
play carries with them but is not willing to reveal to others. It creates, in
the audience, as if it were another character in the play, a "sharer"
of these stage characters' secrets. Through it all we view the lives of these
characters with a fondness, and we root for them. Perhaps we root for them
because we know, very much, why they are doing the things they do to each other.
SCARLET SISTER MARY
Julia Peterkin
1929 Winner
Written by former plantation mistress Julia Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary is a novel of intellect, individualism, coltish word play, tradition and most importantly, respect. The novel, like, Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple, is written in an old southern vernacular, and it tells the story of Sister Mary or Si May-e, a young and sprightly woman at the novel's start. It is some time after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and freedom has come for those individuals who were field slaves or indentured servants. Their opportunity to flee has come, to seek opportunities for self and financial betterment. For some, however, betterment is not up north or anywhere else in the country; it is exactly where it is: the native coastal terrain of South Carolina. Religion, faith, folklore, generational history and magic are the ties that bind the folksy and hard working men and women of the Quarters. Dignity and peacefulness is in the hoeing, the field labor, the mud between the crevices of the rough and crackling flesh. It is in the earth. To combat the joyous harshness of the work is love and a family. And thus, Sister Mary comes into the picture; she is at the marrying age, and July, her suitor, is ready to be her protector and provider. Or so one would believe. Sister Mary's marriage is doomed from the start and it only advances to something worse via the aid of a love charm and another woman's insatiable lust for the groom's affections.
