Teaching Alice Adams

Alice Adams is the story of a young woman trapped between the life she has and the life she desperately wants.

Set in a small Midwestern town in the early twentieth century, the novel follows Alice Adams, the daughter of a struggling, lower-middle-class family. Her father, Virgil Adams, is a modest businessman too proud and too tired to change his circumstances. Her mother pushes relentlessly for the family to appear more prosperous than they are. Alice, caught in the middle, takes on the exhausting work of pretending.

She borrows gowns, invents stories, and performs a version of herself she believes will be accepted by the town's wealthier social circles. When she meets Arthur Russell, a charming young man from a good family, she sees her chance at escape. She courts him carefully, hiding every embarrassing truth about her home life, her father's faltering glue factory venture, and her family's slide from respectability.

Booth Tarkington writes with precise, unsentimental affection for Alice. She is neither villain nor victim. She is a young woman who has absorbed the lesson that class is performance, and who performs it with everything she has. The novel watches her strain under that performance: the calculated smiles at parties where she wasn't quite invited, the dread of Arthur visiting her shabby house, the moment the facade finally cracks.

Published in 1921 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Alice Adams remains one of American literature's sharpest portraits of class anxiety. Its insights into self-deception, family pressure, and the cost of striving feel as immediate now as they did a century ago. Tarkington doesn't mock Alice. He mourns her a little, and by the end, so will you.