The Legacies of Booth Tarkington

Event Details

Booth Tarkington is one of just four authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, putting him in a category with William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. However, Tarkington’s legacy is complicated, despite being one of the most popular authors ever to call Indiana home. With a fresh edition of Alice Adams recently released from Belt Publishing (featuring a new introduction by Allison Lynn), it seems a good time to reflect on the legacy of this Hoosier author. As Robert Gottlieb posed in his 2019 New Yorker article, was Tarkington a Great American Novelist or “America’s most distinguished hack”? Our panelists bring different perspectives on Tarkington’s legacy—architectural, historical, and literary—and provide additional contexts for understanding Booth Tarkington today. 

About the panelists

Ray E. Boomhower is senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press, where he edits the popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. He has worked at the IHS for more than three decades. A native of Mishawaka, Indiana, and a former newspaper reporter, Boomhower has written extensively on World War II media history, including biographies of such noted war correspondents as Scripps-Howard columnist Ernie Pyle and Time magazine reporter Robert L. Sherrod. Boomhower has also published biographies of President Benjamin Harrison, fighter ace Alex Vraciu, photographer John A. Bushemi, astronaut Gus Grissom, longform journalist and political speechwriter John Bartlow Martin, and educator and activist May Wright Sewall. In addition to having numerous articles in Traces and the Indiana Magazine of History, Boomhower has had his work published in the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, the Cleveland Review of Books, and Smithsonian. 

 Allison Lynn is the author of the novels The Exiles (Little A) and Now You See It (Touchstone). In addition to fiction, she has written articles, reviews, and essays for The New York Times Book Review, People, Chicago Sun-Times, Redbook, In Style, and elsewhere. As an editor, she’s honed copy for companies that include Zagat Survey and Scholastic. She’s lectured and read from her work in venues across the country. 

 Allison holds an MFA from New York University and a BA from Dartmouth College. After nearly two decades in New York City, she’s now based in Indianapolis, where she lives with her husband, the writer Michael Dahlie, and their son, Evan. She teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Butler University. 

 Susan Neville’s first collection of short fiction, Invention of Flight, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia, and her second collection, In the House of Blue Lights, won the Richard Sullivan Prize from Notre Dame Press. It was named one of the best books of 1998 by the Chicago Tribune. The Town of Whispering Dolls won the Catherine Doctorow Award for Short Fiction from Fiction Collective 2 and the Indiana Authors Award for Fiction. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “haunted and haunting,” “searing,” and “Rust Belt stories that reject the label ‘flyover country’ with arresting strangeness.”   

In addition to books of fiction, she is the author of seven works of creative nonfiction and hybrid prose, including Fabrication, a collection of lyric essays about Indiana factories; Into the Fire, an eBook about women in the Ku Klux Klan, published as a Ploughshares Solo; and Indiana Winter. Her collection of essays Sailing the Inland Sea was named the Best Book of Indiana in the nonfiction category from the Indiana Center for the Book. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and two Pushcart Prize awards. In 2021 she retired from teaching at Butler University after 38 years. Recent essays and stories have appeared in the North American Review, Missouri Review, Image, Diagram, Southwest Review, and other journals. She was born in Indianapolis and lives there with her husband and one large dog.  

 Benjamin L. Ross is a historic preservation specialist and architectural historian with RATIO Architects, Inc. Ben’s experience includes scholarly research, planning, design, and implementation for restoration, revitalization, rehabilitation, and adaptive reuse projects involving nonprofit, public, and private developer clients as well as public-private partnerships. A graduate of Ball State University’s College of Architecture and Planning, Ben has authored numerous Historic Structure Reports and nominations to the National Register of Historic Places, and his research on Midwestern architecture has been published in the SAH Archipedia and ARRIS, Journal of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.