Although his first book was about English romance, Newton Booth Tarkington, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams, came to be known for his comical (and almost cynical) style of the Lost Generation that characterized the 1920's. Chapter One begins: Across the most vital precincts of the mind a flippant sprite of memory will sometimes skip, to the dismay of all philosophy. So it was with me no longer ago than last night; for, as I sat engaged in the composition of a treatise upon a subject worthy of the profoundest concentration, there suddenly fluttered before my mental eye some cherry-colored ribbons; and, quite inexplicably, at the same time, it became clear to me that the most charming morning of my life was that sunshiny one, in 1762, when Miss Sylvia Gray and I went walking.