Edith Jones Wharton was born in
New York City on January 24, 1862. Her extended family consisted of merchants, bankers, and lawyers and she was educated privately by tutors. When she was thirteen, she published a collection of poetry at her own expense. In 1885 she married Edward Wharton of
Boston. The couple lived in New York, Newport,
Rhode Island, and Paris until their divorce in 1913. After their divorce, Edith settled permanently in Paris. During
World War I, Edith was active in relief work in France. In 1915, she was decorated with the
Cross of the Legion of Honor for her service. She was awarded the
Pulitzer prize for literature in 1920 for her novel "
The Age of Innocence". She died in France in 1937 of a stroke.
Edith began to write seriously after she was married. She wrote for popular magazines, including Scribner's Magazine, and published her first collection of stories, "The Greater Inclination", in 1899. This was followed by books of fiction almost every year for almost a quarter of a century, for a total of eleven collections of short stories and sixteen novels. In 1925, she published "The Writing of Fiction", in which she analyzed the contributions of other authors to the short story form. Of the French and Russian writers of her time, she said that "instead of a loose web spread over the surface of life they have made it, at its best, a shaft driven straight into the heart of human experience". Many of her stories had endings that drove shafts straight into the heart of the reader; what I like to call a "zinger". One of these that does it especially well is "Roman Fever", written in 1936.
The primary focus of much of her work was 19th century New York and the women of society, which she knew from personal experience. She described the ins and outs of society in a way that could only come from someone with first hand experience. Her writing encompassed the subtleties of high society in a way that everyone who picked up one of her novels could understand. The characters she created are interesting and complex, not simple and one-dimensional as many characters in novels are.
Notable Works
Sources