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...

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...

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...

Henry James observed in an August 1902 letter to Edith Wharton's sister-in-law, Mrs. Cadwalader Jones, that Wharton "must be tethered in native pastures, even if it reduces her to a back-yard in New York." At almost the same time, he wrote Wharton,...

Although Edith Wharton is better known as a novelist than a short-story writer, she was in fact writing and publishing stories well before her debut as a novelist in 1902. Her first published story was "Mrs. Manstey's View," in Scribner's Magazine of...

During the early decades of the twentieth century--at a time when New York City could ban women from smoking in public--one American woman published works which discussed love outside of marriage, scandal, class divisions, and poverty. Without...

The breadth of Edith Wharton's achievement makes definition of her place in literary history difficult. For fifty years she wrote prolifically, and her audience ranged from scholars to readers of popular magazines. She produced short stories, ghost...

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...