1912. Although his first book was about English romance, Newton Booth Tarkington, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams, came to be known for his comical (and almost cynical) style of the Lost Generation that characterized the 1920's. The book begins: There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travelers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without. The landscape lies interminably level: bleak in winter, a desolate plain of mud and snow; hot and dusty in summer, in its flat lonesomeness, miles on miles with not one cool hill slope away from the sun. The persistent tourist who seeks for signs of man in this sad expanse perceives a reckless amount of rail fence; at intervals a large barn; and, here and there, man himself, incurious, patient, slow, looking up from the fields apathetically as the Limited flies by. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.