| Edith Wharton was born into Old New York Society in 1862, with impeccable social credentials and financial security. Her early years alternated between houses in Newport and Manhattan (its geographical boundaries demarcated by Washington Square and Central Park, its social spine formed by Fifth Avenue). Although Wharton started writing verses and stories as a child, her first attempts at professional authorship were delayed until 1889. A further decade passed before she broke into the literary scene with a collection of short stories in 1899 and the appearance in 1902 of The Valley of Decision. It took The House of Mirth to make Wharton's fame upon its publication in 1905. Until her death in 1937, Wharton published on an annual basis novels, novellas, poetry, essays, and travel literature. Besides The House of Mirth, her best-known novels are Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), and The Age of Innocence (1920) for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. In 1885 she married Edward ('Teddy') Wharton, a childless union that rapidly proved unsuitable, though they did not divorce until 1913. After years of residing in Newport, New York, and 'The Mount' in Lenox, Massachusetts, Wharton moved permanently to France in 1910. During the First World War Wharton was active in refuge work; this era is reflected in several novels, stories, and essays. She died in 1937 and is buried at Versailles. |
| Martha Banta is Profesor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her book publications include Henry James and the Occult and Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. She has written essays on a variety of authors (the Jameses, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Henry Adams) and interdisciplinary subjects (nineteenth-century American medical practices, the visual arts, and labour-management relations). Her current project is a study of the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American culture of manners and the uses of satiric art. |
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