Alice Adams
1921
In a small Midwestern town shortly after the Great War, Alice Adams lies awake at night, dreaming of better things. The daughter of a struggling lower-middle-class family, she yearns to escape her circumstances: her father's failed business prospects, the shabby house, the neighbors she considers beneath her. When the wealthy and seemingly earnest Arthur Russell arrives in town, Alice sees her chance. She engineers encounters, dresses above her station, and spins elaborate stories about her family's wealth. What follows is at once painfully funny and genuinely moving, as Tarkington chronicles the lengths a young woman will go to reinvent herself, and the humbling education that follows. The novel captures the particular ache of wanting desperately to belong somewhere you're not sure you belong, and the resilience required to face the gap between dream and reality. Alice is vain, scheming, and endlessly sympathetic, a portrait of ambition tempered by experience that feels as relevant today as it did a century ago.
