The Gentleman from Indiana

A young man out of an Eastern college buys a country newspaper in a small Indiana town, prints what he thinks about the Whitecaps who rule the next township, and is beaten nearly to death for it. Tarkington was an Indianapolis man himself and one of only four writers to take the Pulitzer for fiction twice; this was his first novel, published in 1899, and the town — its meanness and its sudden decency — is drawn by someone who could not be lied to about it. Fifty-two plates of American painting, from Bierstadt's Yosemite to John Sloan's Greenwich Village, carry the same plain light on a young country's streets and wild places that Tarkington turns on his Indiana town.