Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer, celebrated as one of the most acute chroniclers of upper-class American society. Born Edith Newbold Jones into a wealthy New York family, she grew up amid the world she would later dissect with such irony and precision in her fiction. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for her novel The Age of Innocence.

Wharton's most famous works include The House of Mirth (1905), a devastating portrait of a beautiful but penniless socialite destroyed by the rigid conventions of New York's elite; Ethan Frome (1911), a stark New England tragedy; The Custom of the Country (1913), a satire of social ambition; and The Age of Innocence (1920), which examines the constraints of 1870s aristocratic society through a doomed love triangle. Her nonfiction debut, The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-authored with Ogden Codman Jr., also proved influential in interior design.

A close friend of Henry James, Wharton lived much of her life in France, where she aided refugees during World War I and received the French Legion of Honour. Her elegant prose and sharp social insight secure her enduring literary reputation.