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...

Supermarkets can't keep pomegranate juices in stock. Farmers can't grow the fruits fast enough. They are everywhere - in shampoo, on lobster dinners, in beer, even on Christmas wreathes. Hard-to-eat, and until recently fairly obscure, pomegranates have become a national phenomenon. Companies rolled...

What it is: With its thin, leathery skin and hundreds of randomly scattered ruby seeds, the pomegranate is among the strangest and, for the cook, most labor-intensive fruits available. Most are brick red and about the size of a softball, grown on shrubby trees...

I was barely 7 when my family moved to Beirut, but I still remember the food: the fried kibbeh (meatballs with bulghur), the kefte (meatballs again, cooked on skewers over charcoal in our kitchen) and the vine leaves that I was allowed to help stuff...

The other night, I had the Kafkaesque experience of showing up at a restaurant I'd been to just three weeks earlier to find it had disappeared. Gone without a trace. My friend and I searched the shuttered storefronts on Cleveland Place in Soho until I...