Newton Booth Tarkington was bom in Indianapolis, Indiana, on July 29, 1869. He attended college at Purdue and Princeton before publishing his first novel, The Gentlemen from Indiana, in 1899. Tarkington is remembered for his realistic novels of the Midwest, including The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921), and for his young adult novels about Penrod Schofield.

Except for a two-year term in the Indiana state legislature, Tarkington spent most of his adult life writing, and his final output was prodigious, totaling more than sixty volumes. In addition to great popular success, Tarkington also achieved critical acclaim, winning two of the first four Pulitzer Prizes given for fiction, with The Magnificent Ambersons in 1919 and Alice Adams in 1921.

Today's readers, though, are probably most familiar with his works for young adults: Penrod and its sequels, Penrod and Sam and Penrod Jashber. Tarkington continued writing until the end of his...