Alice Adams

Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize novel of 1921 follows a young woman in a small Midwestern city who is desperate to seem better off than she is. Alice Adams comes from a struggling lower-middle-class family, and when she meets the well-bred Arthur Russell she works hard to charm him while hiding the plain truth of her circumstances. Her performances grow more strained as her father gambles the family’s security on a risky business scheme. Tarkington writes about social ambition and shame with genuine sympathy rather than mockery, and the closing image of Alice climbing the steps to a business college is one of the quiet, honest endings in American fiction. A free PDF and EPUB edition is available here.