Analysis of Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 13, 2025

Although this book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, Booth Tarkington’s works remain on very few academic lists today. However, Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis in 1869, was quite popular during his lifetime. The Princeton-educated author lived more similarly to the upper-crust Palmer and Lamb families in the novel than he did to the would-be Adamses.

Alice Adams first appeared in serial form in the Pictorial Review, a monthly aimed primarily toward women. Alice Adams exemplifies the literary realism movement of the 1920s, where characters’ aspirations did not always fulfill the American dream’s promise, their circumstances often influencing outcomes. However, characters might progress in alternative directions.

Stylistically skillful, light, and facile, Alice Adams takes place in the early 20th century in a small industrializing town, typical of one in Tarkington’s native Indiana. Twenty-two-year-old Alice, proud and vain, attempts to improve her prospects through creative social climbing. Her accomplice, a domineering mother, manipulates her passive-aggressive invalid husband, only to undermine her mission to help snare Alice a husband whose social standing might elevate her own. Alice attempts to maintain her loyalty to her ridiculous sycophant of a father—whom Tarkington parodies—and appease her mother.

With charm, frivolous fabrications, and enigmatic statements, Alice captures, for a time, the attentions of Arthur Russell, a man of independent means and position. Meanwhile, her brother Walter rebels. Mingling with society’s marginal crowd, he finds the “colored people” more interesting than the “frozen faces” his sister and mother idolize. Where Alice and her mother see glamour, Walter observes artifice and boredom.

Alice’s mother—whose first name Tarkington never reveals—lives through her daughter, who busily incubates their aspirations. It’s a no-win situation; Alice must deny “who she is”—that is, her family. Mrs. Adams barks, “Now you listen to me, Virgil Adams: the way the world is now, money is family. Alice would have just as much ‘family’ as any of ’em—every single bit—if you hadn’t fallen behind in the race” (210). But Tarkington beautifully describes a great equalizer:

“Over the pictures, the vases, the old brown plush rocking chairs and the stool,—over the three gilt chairs, over the new chintz-covered easy chair and the gray velure sofa—over everything everywhere, was the familiar coating of smoke grime. . . . Yet here was no fault of housewifery; the curse could not be lifted . . .” (34).

This “particular ugliness” is an equal-opportunity affliction. Alice “knew that she was unlikely to find anything better within a thousand miles, so long as she kept to the cities, and that none of her friends, however opulent, had any advantage over her” (35). Therefore, cleanliness was, at least in these parts, a virtue that money could not buy.

Although no one dies, goes crazy, or commits suicide, and although even the loose ends neatly tie, Alice Adams is, in a sense, a tragedy. It is not that life will not go on; it is that the characters may never realize their dreams (Broun). But the book has its humorous moments. Arthur Russell’s dinner visit is a comedy of errors. Hot soup, a plethora of etiquette faux pas, an incompetent servant hired solely for the occasion but instructed as regular help, and the sweltering evening keep things interesting.

In 1935 George Stevens adapted Alice Adams into a film starring Katharine Hepburn. Therein, in the manner typical of Depression-era Hollywood romances, Alice Adams manages to secure Arthur Russell. The novel demonstrated that social barriers permitted no such conclusion. Denied the verity of her situation and the chance to face it, Hollywood’s Alice is less dynamic than Tarkington’s original. (Ms. Hepburn, in a later interview, reveals that she favored the novel’s original ending for the film but was overruled.)

Among various motifs, flowers appear throughout Alice Adams. Unable to afford a corsage from a florist, Alice is determined to pick hundreds of violets for her bouquet to attend the party of socialite Mildred Palmer. The violets expire, “betraying her,” prompting Alice to do what she could to conceal them (90). Anticipating a visit from Arthur Russell, Alice arranges carnations. (Only when the flowers are completely exhausted, does he show up.) Roses provided for the Adamses’ ill-fated dinner for Arthur not only droop, the Brussels sprouts’ powerful odor obliterates their scent. Other girls’ flowers never wilt; only Alice’s do.

Russell’s lunchtime visit with the Palmers yielded a “fine rose” in his buttonhole after a garden stroll with Mildred, whom everyone expects Russell to marry (345). But as flowers wither, Alice rebounds. Just as flowers spring anew, so does her hope and resolve. Even when forced to choose her own path—after abandoning the idea of finding an eligible suitor—she sees reason to go on.

Born in a world where a father’s or a husband’s status almost surely determined a woman’s fate, perhaps Alice emerges as a proto-feminist character. (The Nineteenth Amendment became law in 1920.) The women seem trapped in this model. Desperation forces them to lie and manipulate, but Alice sees other options. Alice’s gift is her resilience and a talent for continually reinventing herself.

Sources
Broun, Heywood. “A Group of Books Worth Reading: ‘Alice Adams.’” The Bookman, vol. 54, no. 4, December 1921, pp. 394–395.
Tarkington, Booth. Alice Adams. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.