The Turmoil
By Booth Tarkington
34 chapters
Bibbs is the dreamy, sensitive son of Mr. Sheridan, a cigar-chomping, larger-than-life businessman in the turn-of-the-century American Midwest. Sheridan made his fortune in the rapid industrialization that was overtaking the small towns and cities of America, but Bibbs—named so “mainly through lack of imagination on his mother’s part”—is too sickly to help his father in Sheridan’s relentless quest for “Bigness.” The Turmoil is the first book in Tarkington’s Growth trilogy, a series that explores the destruction of traditional small-town America in favor of industrialization, pollution, automobiles, overcrowding, and suburbia.
Bibbs is the dreamy, sensitive son of Mr. Sheridan, a cigar-chomping, larger-than-life businessman in the turn-of-the-century American Midwest. Sheridan made his fortune in the rapid industrialization that was overtaking the small towns and cities of America, but Bibbs—named so “mainly through lack of imagination on his mother’s part”—is too sickly to help his father in Sheridan’s relentless quest for “Bigness.” The Turmoil is the first book in Tarkington’s Growth trilogy, a series that explores the destruction of traditional small-town America in favor of industrialization, pollution, automobiles, overcrowding, and suburbia.