Finished: Alice Adams (Tarkington) The 1922 Pulitzer Prize winner, Alice Adams was the second book by Booth Tarkington to win the prize. The first was in 1919, The Magnificent Ambersons, which I read back in November of 2012. Having read them both, I can definitely say that Tarkington is one of those writers with the knack for developing characters and describing a setting so well that the story takes the reader right there. The Magnificent Ambersons was much more complicated, with several generations of the Amberson family being explored. Alice Adams is just a simple story about a beautiful, lower-middle class young woman who is trying desperately to climb her way into the social elite and stay there. It's really rather sad how Alice is treated by most of the other town girls, simply because her father, Virgil Adams, has worked for the richest man in town, J.A. Lamb, for thirty years. J.A. Lamb isn't a bad guy. He's always been fair and Virgil Adams has the utmost respect for him. Many years back, though, Lamb had Virgil develop a formula for glue that would actually stick which Virgil did. Virgil, and more importantly, Virgil's wife, thought this would be Virgil's big ticket to making it rich and giving his children the status that their mother so longed for. However, Lamb got interested in other avenues and never went forward with the development of the glue. All these years later, when Alice is humiliated at the only dance she's invited to, she comes home sobbing...but not wanting her father, who has been sick, to hear. He does hear, though, and finally decides after years of nagging that he will do as his wife asked, take the glue formula, and start his own factory. When he sends Lamb a letter of resignation, Lamb is furious and opens his own factory, which will pretty much decimate Virgil's, thus, ruining him and his family. When Virgil confronts Lamb, Lamb actually has a heart and though he doesn't take Virgil back to work for him, he pays him enough to cover all his debt, including paying off his house, to buy Virgil's small factory, which Lamb doesn't really need. So....all of this drama is brought about by the mother nagging the father about Alice (and her brother) not having what all the other rich kids have. And, it comes from Alice having the attitude and giving off airs to everyone in town that she IS as well off as the other girls. When Alice meets the new rich boy in town, Arthur Russell, he is smitten with her personality and beauty, and he spends many evenings walking with her and talking on the porch. She begs him not to listen to what anyone in town has to say about her. She knows he'll find out how poor she is, and apparently, though never actually stated, that she was rather "fast" with the boys as a teenager. Anyway, Arthur inadvertently hears the talk, first about how Alice's father has stolen the glue formula from Lamb (which I suppose technically he did since he developed it while in Lamb's employ), and then about how Alice is a really pushy girl who resorts to fabrications. Arthur is very sad to hear this, but he can't unhear it. When he goes to the Adams house that evening for the first official dinner to be spent with Alice's parents, everything goes wrong and Arthur is so disconcerted anyway, that Alice realizes this will be the last time he comes courting. She basically created her own fate by willing it to be so and over-emphasizing to him that she didn't want him to listen to what anyone had to say about her, instead of just being herself and being truthful. It was her own true self that he was actually attracted to. In the end, after watching her father go through the business struggle he does and have a relapse of illness, Alice finally grows up a bit. She tells herself she'll quit trying to be someone she's not and she heads to the business company in town that trains young ladies to be secretaries and stenographers...a place she had detested and avoided all her young life.

It's not a bad story, or too terribly sad. I think the worst part for me was how society simply wouldn't even let Alice be a part of the rich girls...and...how terribly the mother nagged at her husband to get him to give up a secure job, the respect of his boss, and his own self-respect, to try and become rich like everyone else. Does this book have the meat and emotional content that All The Light We Cannot See, 2015 winner does? Nope. :-) But,  I definitely got hooked on the story as I was reading, and enjoyed the writing.