The Magnificent Ambersons

  • Author Booth Tarkington
  • Narrator Geoffrey Blaisdell
  • Publisher Blackstone Publishing
  • Run Time 9 hours and 36 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Classic fiction.
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What to expect

Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize when it was first published, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The family serves as a metaphor for the old society that crumbled after the Industrial Revolution while a middle-western town spread and darkened into a city.

George Amberson Minafer is the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family's magnificence. George, eclipsed by a new breed of industrial tycoons and land developers whose power comes not through family connections but through financial dealings and modern manufacturing, descends from the Midwestern aristocracy to the working class. But George refuses to accept his diminishing status, clinging to all the superficiality he has always known.

As the wheels of industry transform the social landscape, the definitions of ambition, success, and loyalty also change.

Critics Review

  • “An admirable study of character and of American life.”

    New York Times

  • “The 1919 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel portrays the decline of the superrich Amberson family, who act as a metaphor for the old society that crumbled after the Industrial Revolution. All fiction collections should own a copy, and all video collections should include Orson Welles’s 1942 film version.”

    Library Journal

  • “Geoffrey Blaisdell gives proper blue-blood intonation to the Amberson clan and their contemporaries. He also gives appropriate tones to the servants and the townspeople.”

    AudioFile

  • “It is a view of Indianapolis’ evolution from a major marketing center to a great industrial city. It adds a new dimension to one’s understanding of the coming of the Industrial Age.”

    Herman B Wells, Indiana University

  • “This novel no doubt was 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.”

    Van Wyck Brooks, literary critic, biographer, and, historian

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