The complete online text of Crucial Instances by Edith Wharton.

Edith Wharton (1861-1937), American author, chronicled the life of affluent Americans between the Civil War and World War I. Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City, probably on Jan. 24, 1861. Like many other biographical facts, she k...

While at the close of her career Edith Wharton was sometimes regarded as passe, a literary aristocrat whose fiction about people of high social standing had little to tell about the masses, particularly during the Jazz Age and the Depression, a counterva...

Perhaps the most striking thing about Edith Wharton 's reputation as a novelist is the fact that she has been "reclaimed" so many times. This fact seems all the more remarkable when one reflects that before her death in 1937, her novels and short stories...