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The text of America Moved consists of two works of memoir by Booth Tarkington that have never before appeared together in book form. Part One was never collected in book form at all. Under the title “As I Seem to Me,” it was serialized in seven issues of the Saturday Evening Post in July and August 1941, in the order presented here. Here Tarkington covers the period of his life from his birth in 1869 until 1899 (more or less), when his novel The Gentleman from Indiana was published. The titles of the individual chapters, as well as the subheads, appear here as they did in the Post.

Part Two of this volume, “The World Does Move,” was published in 1928 under the same title by Doubleday, Doran and Company, and is reproduced here by permission of the Booth Tarkington estate. Less conventionally autobiographical than “As I Seem to Me,” it covers the years from 1895, when Tarkington moved to New York to try to forge a career as a writer, until near the time of its publication, when Tarkington was well established in the literary world. Even more than in Part One, Tarkington in these pages often frustratingly declines to specify the men and women whom he discusses. I have provided identifications of as many of them as possible.

Nearly every chapter in “The World Does Move” was first run in the Saturday Evening Post between April 7 and July 7, 1928. The exceptions are chapter XX (first published in Red Book Magazine in May 1921, and later in The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories [1923], as “Jeannette”); chapter XXII (Collier’s, May 14, 1927, as “When Is It Dirt?”); and part of chapter XXV (The Forum, March 1926, as “The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis”).

The only editorial change I have made to the text, besides correcting occasional typographical errors, is to add the Oxford comma. All ellipses are in the original, and all footnotes are mine, not Tarkington’s.

This book has been some years in the making, and I am deeply grateful to a number of people for their assistance and encouragement. An earlier version of the editor’s introduction ran in the University Bookman (vol. 46, no. 3). I am grateful to editor Gerald Russello for permission to reuse some of that material here. Along the way, Cory Andrews, Keith Bice, Richard Brake, Montgomery Brown, Jeff Cain, Kate Dalton, Matt Dellinger, Joseph Epstein, Andrew Ferguson, Matthew Gerken, Darryl Hart, Mark Henrie, Bill Kauffman, Dennis Lager, John Lukacs, Mark Mitchell, Anne Neal, Peggy Noonan, Amie Peele-Carter, Jason Peters, Cris Piquinela, Jeff Polet, Scott Russell Sanders, Lee Slade, Whit Stillman, Howard Trivers, and the staff of the Indiana Historical Society, among many others not mentioned here, offered useful advice, assistance, and encouragement. I offer all of them my sincere gratitude.

Near the end of this project, I was thrilled to make contact with one of Booth Tarkington’s great-great-nephews, Booth Jameson, his wife Jennifer, and his parents, John and Elizabeth Jameson. They not only expressed enthusiasm for this project, but they freely shared information, stories, and memories about Tarkington, his family, and his literary estate. I was inspired by their loyalty to Tarkington’s legacy, and I hope to learn more from them in the years to come.

My wife, Kara, is always encouraging no matter how dimwitted my ideas. Every husband should be so lucky.