The Magnificent Ambersons

The Magnificent Ambersons is a novel by the American writer Booth Tarkington, published in 1918 and the second of his Growth trilogy.

The book follows a family across three generations in a city modelled on Indianapolis, and it is as much about the town as about the people: the streets spread, horses give way to motor cars, and the fortunes made in manufacturing overtake the ones that came from land and inheritance. Isabel Amberson, who married for position rather than love, and her son George, who is spoiled by everybody including himself, are at the centre, and the man Isabel did not marry becomes the businessman whose industry the Ambersons look down on. Tarkington writes the decline from inside the family's own view of itself, so that the reader sees what is coming before George does.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was the second of three novels about American growth and change, in a trilogy that opened with The Turmoil and closed with The Midlander a few years later.