![]() ![]() ![]() The force of Ambersons is in its ambivalence. With the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Magnificent Ambersons, he struck a more mournful and ambivalent note. Penrod (1914), his nostalgic sketches of an Indiana boyhood, had instantly become part of the culture. When Welles was an infant, Booth Tarkington had already memorialized the disappearance of that old-fashioned world in a 1918 novel, The Magnificent Ambersons-which Welles would film so stunningly in 1942-that was also a simmering polemic against the forces of industry and greed that had befouled the one he grew up in. In 1918, Tarkington came as close as anyone to being America’s preeminent writer, a copiously productive novelist and playwright who was both a beloved entertainer and a respected national figure. ![]() No electric light, horse-drawn buggies-a completely anachronistic, old-fashioned, early-Tarkington, rural kind of life.” “Anachronistic” was the right word. In his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich published as This Is Orson Welles, Welles speaks nostalgically of the time he spent with his father in a tranquil enclave of 1920s Illinois, comparing it to “a childhood back in the 1870s. Dolores Costello as Isabel Amberson Minafer and Tim Holt as her son, George Amberson Minafer, in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942 ![]()
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