The Gentleman From Indiana

"The Gentleman From Indiana" by way of Booth Tarkington is a gripping tale that brings readers to America's heartland, wherein a young newspaper editor named John Harkless struggles with love, loyalty, and the ethical complexity of small town existence. Set in rural Indiana around the turn of the 20th century, the novel addresses issues of integrity, justice, and the battle between subculture and progress. As Harkless navigates the challenges of his career and struggles with his own ideals, he turns into entangled in an internet of political intrigue and personal drama. Along the method, he develops robust bonds with the humans in his community, from the active younger lady he adores to the peculiar folks who inhabit the city. Through Tarkington's first rate prose and profound perception into human nature, "The Gentleman From Indiana" gives a brilliant imaginative and prescient of a bygone era and examines everlasting concerns approximately honor, duty, and sacrifice. As Harkless faces corruption and deceit in his pursuit of truth and justice, he epitomizes the values of a actual gentleman, garnering readers' admire and admiration for many years to return.

Reproduction of the original.

Excerpt from The Gentleman From Indiana On the station 'platforms therefire always two or three wooden packing-boxes, apparently marked for travel, but they are sacred from disturbance and remain on the platform forever; possibly the right train never comes along. They serve to enthrone a few station loafers, who look out from under their hat-brims at the faces in the car-windows with the languid scorn a permanent fixture always has for a transient, and the pity an American feels for a fellow-being who does not live in his town. Now and then the train passes a town built scatteringly about a court-house, with a mill or two humming near the tracks. This is a county-seat, and the inhabitants and the local papers refer to it confi dently as our city. The heart of the flat lands is a central area called Carlow County, and the county seat of Carlow is a town unhappily named in honor of its first settler, williamvplatt, who christened it with his blood. Natives of this place have sometimes re marked, easily, that'their city had a population of from five to six thousand souls. It is easy to forgive them for such statements; civic pride is a virtue. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Newton Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. In the 1910s and 1920s he was considered America's greatest living author. Several of his stories were adapted to film. During the first quarter of the 20th century, Tarkington, along with Meredith Nicholson, George Ade, and James Whitcomb Riley helped to create a Golden Age of literature in Indiana. Booth Tarkington served one term in the Indiana House of Representatives, was critical of the advent of automobiles, and set many of his stories in the Midwest.

Newton Booth Tarkington (July 29, 1869 - May 19, 1946) was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. He is one of only three novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner and John Updike.Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. He was named after his maternal uncle Newton Booth, then the governor of California. He was also related to Chicago Mayor James Hutchinson Woodworth through Woodworth's wife Almyra Booth Woodworth. Tarkington first attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, but completed his secondary education at Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school on the East Coast. He attended Purdue University for two years, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity and the university's Morley Eating Club. He later made substantial donations to Purdue for building an all-men's residence hall, which the university named Tarkington Hall in his honor. Purdue awarded him an honorary doctorate

Booth Tarkington's first novel, The Gentleman From Indiana, lays out a number of the recurring themes that would reappear in many of the author's later works, including a Midwestern setting and a highly moral protagonist who battles against forces of evil which are often symptomatic of deeper problems in the United States. In this story, the upright John Harkness returns to his hometown after law school, only to find himself locked in conflict with a group of racist crusaders.

There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travellers, 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. Widely separated from each other are small frame railway stations-sometimes with no other building in sight, which indicates that somewhere behind the adjacent woods a few shanties and thin cottages are grouped about a couple of brick stores.