The Magnificent Ambersons

In the Midwest town where the Ambersons ruled, time moves like honey until it doesn't. George Amberson Minafer - grandson of the magnate who built their empire - is the most insufferable young man in America, a creature of pure entitlement who has never been told no. He rides through life on his family's money and name, blind to everything except his own desires. Then the automobile arrives, and with it a new breed of men: practical, restless, hungry. They build roads where there were lanes, factories where there were fields. George watches his world become unrecognizable, and his desperate attempts to preserve what was always already dying make the fall far more catastrophic than it needed to be. Tarkington wrote this novel in 1918, when America was still processing its own transformation, and he captured something true about how civilizations eat their young.