Booth Tarkington , novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, best known for his fiction depicting middle-class life in the American Midwest during the early decades of the twentieth century, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of John Stevenson Tarkington, a lawyer, and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. Named Newton Booth Tarkington in honor of his uncle Newton Booth, who was governor of California and later a U.S. Senator, Tarkington early dropped his first name. He dictated his first stories to his sister when he was six years old, but even after his college days, Tarkington wanted to be an illustrator at least as much as a writer. He pursued both interests at Phillips Exeter Academy, Purdue University, which he attended for one year, and Princeton University, which he entered as a special student in 1891 but left in 1893 without attaining a degree. At Princeton, Tarkington illustrated and wrote for student publications...