It’s the birthday of Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), one of the only authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. (The others are Faulkner and Updike.) He’s best known for the two novels that won: The Magnificent Ambersons (1918; film by Orson Welles, 1942) and Alice Adams (1921).

Tarkington was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, set some of his fiction in a fictionalized Indianapolis, and later died in Indianapolis. If he could have married Indianapolis, he would have, but he couldn’t so instead he married Louisa Fletcher in 1902; they divorced in 1911, and he married Susanah Keifer Robinson in 1912. Sometimes he cheated on Indianapolis by summering in Kennebunkport, Maine; he had a home there named Seawood and a schooner named Regina.

Backing up: Tarkington studied at Purdue and then Princeton, where he was socially very active but failed to graduate because of one missing course. (Princeton said, “We don’t care!” and conferred on him not one but two honorary degrees.) He went on to become a prolific and wildly popular author, starting with his first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), and continuing with Monsieur Beaucaire (1900) and several novels for young people, including Penrod (1914) and Penrod and Sam (1916), and many more works. He was considered the most important American novelist of his day—yet overall the critics have damned him as “middlebrow,” perhaps because a streak of “sentimental melodrama” runs through much of his work.

In his later years, Tarkington lost his eyesight but continued to write via dictation. He died at 76.

Full disclosure: I haven’t read The Magnificent Ambersons but based on Orson Welles’s excellent movie, I’d like to.

Have a hot, steamy, loudly-rasping-cicada kind of Monday, good luck getting any work done with your precious beloved adorable children enjoying their summer vacation, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.