Well, the best hidden anti-hero in modern literature must surely be George Amberson Minefer. As a study of Freud's Oedipal Complex theory, even by modern standards, he is an interesting guy. He is the protagonist of Booth Tarkington's 'The Magnificent Ambersons', more famous for being Orson Welles's flawed movie than for the novel itself which is a towering achievment of literary imagination. It is a rare glimpse into a passing moment of splendour in American urban life before the advent of modernity, partly due to greed, partly due to uncontrollable global forces but also by the inevitable osmosis of being an experimental nation on the cutting edge of human evolution.

People live there as a matter of having merely arrived, perhaps having failed to socialise somewhere else, sometimes trampling on those who were there before them. Wealth, at least its consquence, is a temporary event but more than that, George Amberson Minefer is a product of an amorous misunderstanding and thus even more precious, for the inevitability of circumstance, to the giver of his life - his mother, Isabel.

Things work out at all well for no one in this story, except in the end George does find love with Lucy and aspects of this union (to those who have read the story) move to a poignancy matching 'Wuthering Heights'. It takes Freud's theory right to another level of metaphysics. Orson Welles said in his interview with Peter Bogdanovich in 1970, "Tarkington must be rediscovered."

Booth Tarkington won the Pulitzer Prize in 1918.

"Listen here, mamma: grandpa wouldn't wipe his shoe on that ole story-teller, would he?" - Georgie, 11 years old