THE TWO VANREVELS

by Booth Tarkington

1902 ~ TRUE October 1st Edition ~ First Printing

ILLUSTRATED by Henry Hutt

with a frontispiece + 5 tipped in illustrated plates
 

McClure, Phillips & Co., New York, 1902. This book is bound in a green cloth cover with white embossed illustrations and gold gilt titling on the spine and cover. The boards have a slant with some rubbing, edge and corner wear. The spine is lightened and there are small tears and light fraying on spine edges and corners. Previous owner inscription and date of 1903 on FFEP. Inside pages are nicely intact with light pulling in the center. There are light stains on top/bottom center edges and random smudges/spots here and there. The volume features 5 tipped in black and white plates (3 of which are loose but in place) and the frontispiece which is protected from the title page by the original tissue. There are 10 pages of ads for other Booth Tarkington books in the back.

Newton Booth Tarkington (1869 – 1946) was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. Much of Tarkington’s work consists of satirical and closely observed studies of the American class system and its foibles. He himself came from a patrician family that lost much of its wealth after the Panic of 1873 (after a measure of wealth returned, his mother transferred him to Princeton University to complete his education). Today, he is best known for his novel The Magnificent Ambersons, which Orson Welles filmed in 1942. It is included in the Modern Library’s list of top-100 novels. The second volume in Tarkington’s Growth trilogy, it contrasted the decline of the “old money” Amberson dynasty against the rise of “new money” industrial tycoons in the years between the Civil War and World War I.