"THERE AREN'T ANY OLD TIMES. WHEN TIMES ARE GONE THEY'RE NOT OLD, THEY'RE DEAD! THERE AREN'T ANY TIMES BUT NEW TIMES!": FIRST EDITION OF THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, 1918, IN RARE UNRESTORED FIRST STATE DUST JACKET

TARKINGTON, Booth. The Magnificent Ambersons. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1918. Octavo, original brown cloth, original dust jacket. $19,500.

First edition of Tarkington's best known novel, winner of the 1919 Pulitzer and the basis for Orson Welles' celebrated movie of the same title, in the very rare first-state dust jacket.

The second novel in Tarkington's Growth trilogy, The Magnificent Ambersons is a narrative of the decline of an aristocratic family in Indiana, committed, in one character's words, to a world of "being things" rather than "doing things" in the face of ever-quickening industrialization and change, in particular the arrival of the automobile. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1919, the first of Tarkington's two Pulitzers (he also won in 1922 for Alice Adams), making Tarkington one of only four fiction writers ever to win more than one Pulitzer—the others being William Faulkner, John Updike and Colson Whitehead. According to a contemporary review, "Its achievement is not so much in pointed detail or penetrating phrase as in the exhaustive revelation of a thoroughly significant national type" (New Republic). According to Van Wyck Brooks, The Magnificent Ambersons has earned "a permanent page in the social history of the United States, so admirably conceived and written was the tale of the Ambersons, their house, their fate and the growth of the community in which they were submerged in the end." First turned into a movie in 1925 with the title Pampered Youth, it was most famously made into a movie of the same title in 1942, considered to this day one of the masterpieces of cinema: it was named one of the top 10 films ever made by Sight and Sound magazine in both 1972 and 1982, number 11 of the greatest American films ever made by the BBC in 2015, and was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1991. With eight full-page illustrations. Dust jacket in the rare first state, with a price of $1.40 on the spine (later repriced to $1.50 with the original price crossed out but still visible).

Interior generally fine with a few instances of faint marginal soiling, cloth with a bit of soiling, mild rubbing and toning to spine. Bright unrestored dust jacket with closed tears along top edge, one very small chip to spine head. A beautiful copy, most rare in the first-state dust jacket.