'Alice Adams'

Booth Tarkington

Pulitzer 1922

When we first meet Alice, she's daydreaming and posturing before the mirror, "clasping her hands behind her neck, and tilting back her head to foreshorten the face in a tableau conceived to represent sauciness, then one of smiling weariness, then one of scornful toleration, and all very piquant." This is Alice's painful essence, a self-conscious young woman, desperate to rise above her shabby background and be what she is not. The novel, written with pathos and infused with humor, gave the world an enduring literary character.