The Magnificent Ambersons is certainly flawed (one never believes the attraction of Morgan's daughter, Lucy, to George), and padded enough for one to wonder if it might not have benefited from the editorial ruthlessness that befell Welles's film, cut by the studio from 132 minutes to eighty-eight after a disappointing preview. Even so, only six years ago The Magnificent Ambersons managed to get Tarkington onto the Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century (albeit at No. 100).

One won't argue with the inclusion, even though Tarkington could not resist a wildly sentimental conclusion presided over by Isabel's spirit, which Morgan manages to channel through a medium. The novelist once decried unhappy endings as the means by which authors "cheaply" earn a reputation for emotional power—a rationalization, actually, of his own kind of customer relations. His mentor Howells had said that Americans wanted tragedy with a happy ending, and in book after book Tarkington tended to take this witticism for a prescription.

Only once, three years after The Magnificent Ambersons, did he fully resist his own patent medicine, producing his greatest work, a book the Modern Library's judges might credibly have put into their top fifty, if they had remembered to include it at all.

Alice Adams "is my most actual & 'life-like' work ... about as humorous as tuberculosis," Tarkington wrote shortly after publishing the book, in 1921. The novel is fundamentally preoccupied with neurosis (in the form of the heroine's compulsions), but it begins with the physical ills of Alice's father: Virgil Adams lies upstairs, trying to convalesce in the usual Midland city that's now covered with fumes and smoke and the soot of soft coal. His job is being held open for him by his benevolent boss, Mr. Lamb, an old-style capitalist in the mold of Major Amberson.

But Adams's appreciation of Lamb is not shared by his termagant wife, who believes the boss undervalues her husband in the only manner that counts these days. "Now you listen to me, Virgil Adams: the way the world is now, money is family." Mrs. Adams is the worst of Tarkington's many viperish wives, pushing Virgil to start his own glue factory with a formula long ago developed on Mr. Lamb's money and time. She is as much a part of the new capitalism as the smoke and noise now choking the city, and by succumbing to her taunts Adams risks a financial disaster more grimly personal than the slow dynastic slide of the Ambersons.

And yet in this, the best plotted of his novels, Tarkington subordinates everything to the small, dank tragedy of the Adamses' daughter, Alice, a brilliantly rendered blend of her mother's pretensions and father's good heart, but animated by a nervous cleverness all her own. At twenty-two, despite good looks and vivacity, this young woman, so desperate to be noticed, has doomed herself to an entirely strategic life of gesture and imitation: aping the smile of an actress, wearing a turban with a white veil, carrying a malacca cane and passing out the calling cards that became obsolete a generation before. Caught in the middle class, Alice manages to be both George Minafer and the people he despises. In a passage that may lack Fitzgerald's lyricism but equals his social precision, Tarkington makes clear how time has already passed Alice by.

When she was sixteen "all the nice boys in town," as her mother said, crowded the Adamses' small veranda and steps, or sat near by, cross-legged on the lawn, on summer evenings; and at eighteen she had replaced the boys with "the older men." By this time most of "the other girls," her contemporaries, were away at school or college, and when they came home to stay, they "came out"—that feeble revival of an ancient custom offering the maiden to the ceremonial inspection of the tribe. Alice neither went away nor "came out" ... She had been a belle too soon.

Like one of Tarkington's Negro child-pals, Alice finds herself good enough for the games of youth, but outgrown by force of social and economic custom. She now barely gets an invitation to the fancy Mildred Palmer's dance, but manages, once there, to spend time with the good-looking Arthur Russell, who ought to be out of reach but is enough his own man to be "fascinated by her quickness" and powers of flirtation. What he does not yet realize is that her show-horse verbal style cannot be turned off. Alice will soon, in one of her few honest moments, admit to Russell, "I was wondering what I wanted to make you think of me."