Book Description
The Magnificent Ambersons is the epic story of an America family's traumatic tumble from the dizzying heights of fame and fortune. A dynasty spanning three generations, the Ambersons' pre-eminence as society's elite is threatened--not only by a hungry new breed of industrial entrepreneur--but from its own arrogance and greed. At the center of the story is George Amberson Minafer, the pampered but pitiful, scion of the clan upon whose shoulders the fate of the family fortune will be won...or lost.
At once an exciting chronicle of a family's rise to fortune and its tortured downfall, it is also a fascinating portrait of the forces that shaped American society.
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, 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. Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known through the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but as the critic Stanley Kauffmann noted, "It is high time that [the novel] appear again, to stand outside the force of Welles's genius, confident in its own right."