Overdue is a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. Updates Mondays.
![A screenshot of Booth Tarkington's Wikipedia: By the later twentieth century, however, he was ignored in academia: no congresses, no society, no journal of Tarkington Studies.[citation needed] In 1981, The Avenue (Penguin) Companion to English and American Literature described him as "the epitome of the middle-brow American novelist."[12] In 1985, he was cited as an example of the great discrepancy possible between an author's fame when alive and oblivion later. According to this view, if an author succeeds at pleasing his or her contemporaries—and Tarkington's works have not a whiff of social criticism—he or she is not going to please later readers of inevitably different values and concerns.[26]
In 2004, author and critic Thomas Mallon noted: "Entirely absent from most current histories of American writing, Tarkington was generally scorned by those published just before or after his death."[27]
In 2019, Robert Gottlieb wrote that Tarkington "dwindled into America's most distinguished hack." Gottlieb criticized Tarkington's anti-modernist perspective, "his deeply rooted, unappeasable need to look longingly backward, an impulse that goes beyond nostalgia," for preventing him from "producing so little of real substance."[1]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3czawnng2ptepg5o43y4fm3v/bafkreidqkzkv6bttiablkv7urobcwp6tzu7bbdfpkabzhxhqr4zlitzbga)
![A screenshot of a tweet from @sadiqojn saying “Why do [we] bash “dead-beat” dads for not being there for their kids but we never question if the child has bad vibes? Or if they’re just unpleasant to be around?”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3czawnng2ptepg5o43y4fm3v/bafkreigjc4aljp3urduz5gh2tachev4qiu4qw6mbm4ipvwnf5vphdi2q4e)
Overdue is a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. Updates Mondays.