Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is a tragic love story and a powerful homily about the perils of a perfect marriage.
The upper stratum of New York society into which Edith Wharton was
born in 1862 provided her with an abundance of material as a
novelist but did not encourage her growth as an artist. Educated by
tutors and governesses, she was raised for only one career-
marriage. But her marriage, in 1885, to Edward Wharton was an
emotional disappointment, if not a disaster. She suffered the first
of a series of nervous breakdowns in 1894. In spite of the strain
of her marriage, or perhaps because of it, she began to write
fiction and published her first story in 1889.
Her first published book was a guide to interior decorating, but
this was followed by several novels and story collections. They
were written while the Whartons lived in Newport and New York,
traveled in Europe, and built their grand home, The Mount, in
Lenox, Massachusetts. In Europe, she met Henry James, who became
her good friend, traveling companion, and the sternest but most
careful critic of her fiction. The House of Mirth (1905) was both a
resounding critical success and a bestseller, as was Ethan Frome
(1911). In 1913 the Whartons were divorced, and Edith took up
permanent residence in France. Her subject, however, remained
America, especially the moneyed New York of her youth. Her great
satiric novel, The Custom of the Country was published in 1913 and
The Age of Innocence won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.
In her later years, she enjoyed the admiration of a new generation
of writers, including Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In
all, she wrote some thirty books, including an autobiography. A
Backwards Glance (1934). She died at her villa near Paris in 1937.
"Is it—in this world—vulgar to ask for more? To entreat a little
wildness, a dark place or two in the soul?"—Katherine Mansfield
"There is no woman in American literature as fascinating as the
doomed Madame Olenska. . . . Traditionally, Henry James has always
been placed slightly higher up the slope of Parnassus than Edith
Wharton. But now that the prejudice against the female writer is on
the wane, they look to be exactly what they are: giants, equals,
the tutelary and benign gods of our American literature."—Gore
Vidal
"Will writers ever recover that peculiar blend of security and
alertness which characterizes Mrs. Wharton and her tradition?"—E.
M. Forster
Gr 10 Up-By Edith Wharton. This tragi-comedy won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize.
"Is it-in this world-vulgar to ask for more? To entreat a little
wildness, a dark place or two in the soul?"-Katherine Mansfield
"There is no woman in American literature as fascinating as the
doomed Madame Olenska. . . . Traditionally, Henry James has always
been placed slightly higher up the slope of Parnassus than Edith
Wharton. But now that the prejudice against the female writer is on
the wane, they look to be exactly what they are: giants, equals,
the tutelary and benign gods of our American literature."-Gore
Vidal
"Will writers ever recover that peculiar blend of security and
alertness which characterizes Mrs. Wharton and her tradition?"-E.
M. Forster
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