Alice Adams - Booth Tarkington - Alice Adams is a 1921 novel by Booth Tarkington that received the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It was adapted as a film in 1923 by Rowland V. Lee and, more famously, in 1935 by George Stevens.The narrative centers on the character of a young woman (the eponymous Alice Adams) who aspires to climb the social ladder and win the affections of a wealthy young man named Arthur Russell. The story is set in a lower-middle-class household in an unnamed town in the Midwest shortly after World War I.