Authors

American · 1862–1937

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was an American novelist and short story writer whose works — The House of Mirth (1905), The Age of Innocence (1920, Pulitzer Prize), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913) — anatomize the upper-class New York society into which she was born with devastating precision. Divorced and largely resident in France from 1907, she organized extensive relief work during World War One. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her friendship with Henry James was the most significant literary relationship of both their lives.