Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels of social and psychological insight. She was also well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt....

Glennard had never thought himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness. The story of a young man who scorns the love of a tortured novelist, only to have her words come back to haunt him from the dead, The Touchstone shows off the skills Wharton became famous for in novels such as Ethan Frome and House of Mirth, particularly her piercing and delicious talent for satiric observation. But despite its masterly control, this...

Bunner Sisters, written in 1892 but not published until 1916 in Xingu and Other Stories, takes place in a shabby neighborhood in New York City. The two Bunner sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles to Stuyvesant Square's "female population." Ann Eliza gives Evelina a clock for her birthday. The clock leads the sisters to become involved with Herbert Ramy, owner...

In the early years of the 20th Century, Edith Wharton took the road trip of a lifetime across France with the celebrated author, Henry James (author of 'Turn of the Screw,' later adapted for TV, featuring 'Downton Abbey' star Michelle Dockery). Accompanied by Edith's husband, their chauffeur, and Wharton's two dogs, they travelled the French countryside, stopping wherever inspiration struck. The result, 'A Motor-Flight Through France,' is a chronicle...

Sit back, relax, and join Edith Wharton on her journey through early 20th century Italy. A seasoned traveller, 'Italian Backgrounds' condenses a decade's worth of Edith Wharton's journeys through Italy, into one work. A chronicle rather than a novel, Wharton perfectly captures the essence, architecture, countryside, and people she comes across on her sojourn. Her adventure starts in Swiss Splügen, where she and her party must decide which road to...

This amply annotated edition of Wharton's 1911 classic novella includes textual notes and documents, including Wharton's preface, letters, reviews, and early short story, "Mrs. Manstey's View." It is accompanied by the editor's comprehensive introduction and a wide array of readings on topics central to the novella: tragedy, health and fitness, sex and marriage, and turn-of-the-century New England poverty and isolation. Of her twenty-five novels and...

This tragic love story reveals the destructive effects of wealth and social hypocrisy on Lily Bart, a ravishing beauty. Impoverished but well-born, Lily realizes a secure future depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. Her downfall begins with a romantic indiscretion, intensifies with an accumulation of gambling debts, and climaxes in a maelstrom of social disasters.

Biographer Lee gives us a new Edith Wharton--tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. She developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than...