Booth Tarking ton was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. The Flirt is set in a midwestern small town. It was the first of Tarkington's novels to be serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. The Flirt was followed by the Penrod stories which were a group of tales drawn from the author's boyhood memories of growing up in Indiana. Cora is the central figure in the family. She is the first choice of all the men in town. She loves this attention and craves more of it. She flirts with one man after another as she tires with them.