Pulitzer Book Club Inclusion Guide
"Alice Adams"
by Booth Tarkington
INCLUSION MILESTONES
1922
• 1st presidential radio address
• 1st female senator serves one day until man is available
• Douglass home landmarked
• Lincoln Memorial dedicated
• 1st public NYC Bat Mitzvah
AUTHOR INSPIRATIONS
Tarkington grew up in a family where wealth fluctuated. He was an actor as a college student and wrote plays for Broadway. Tarkington married twice and had one daughter who died young.
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Featured Reader Wanted!
Featured Reader
– Share your key take-away about inclusion in this book in a sentence or two.
– Write a paragraph or two (up to 250 words) to describe your thoughts on exclusion/inclusion in the book, why you related or did not connect with the book, and why you think reading, inclusion and dialog about inclusion matter.
– Identify the name and website address of a cause you support with an inclusive mission.
Misfortunes triggered by social climbing husband hunter and her family.
Embarrassment at high-stakes dance: wild violets wilt, must pretend to have suitor, brother shoots crap.
(Spoiler) Girl doesn't get the big-catch guy.
Painful 323 pages, 8 hours
Don’t pretend to be somebody you’re not, or nag somebody to do that.
Absolute bigotry.
Black people vilified. Lower middle class looks down on their “maid.”
Brother has fun with – gasp – Black people.
Young woman who tries too hard ridiculed by upper crust.
Off-the-rails mother pressures father to betray boss/big-man-in-town he idolizes.
Rich old white man “rescues” struggling employee and his troubled family.
Failed tragic-comic dinner party, starting with caviar apps that taste like plastic. Your soup course, sweetbread pâté, larded fillet, and potato balls may be bad ideas because of extreme heat. Everyone may want out well before ice cream and angel-food cake.
“We don’t often make people think what we want them to think.”
Spend way too much time rearranging roses that wilt and cleaning and rearranging shabby furniture. A small dining room overwhelmed by smell of fashionable brussels sprouts and shoving a bucket behind the door at the top of a stairwell are not good decisions.
What was the most offensive thing in this novel? Why?
Where was there disfunction?
How did physical and mental status shape behavior of the characters?
What does providing for family mean? How did the family hurt and attempt to support each other?
In what ways did gender, class, and racial stereotypes manifest?
What messages about morality in this book pertain to exclusion?
How and why do young people try to fit in and figure out who they are in this novel and over time? Where is the line between exploring and posing?
What was the influence of soft-coal, WWI, fashion, and transportation?
You’re headed to a midwestern town where you can stay in one place and covet another. Why not head to a suburb of St. Louis, near the glue-manufacturing Mid-West Industrial Chemical Company and business colleges which may, or may not, be portals of doom? You can visit the Museum of the Blues, go to dance halls without an invitation or escort, shoot craps in a casino, and visit the Griot Museum, the first black history wax museum in the Midwest.
See the 1935 version of Alice Adams, rather than the original 1923 adaptation.
Tarkington first won a Pulitzer for The Magnificent Ambersons (1921). The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1924) are the prequel and sequel to Ambersons in Tarkington’s Growth trilogy: some consider Alice Adams part of that series.
Tarkington wrote more than 40 novels, including the Penrod novels, as well as plays and short stories.