January 24th, 2002
American novelist Edith Newbold Jones Wharton (The Age of Innocence, 1920) is born in New York City in 1862.
Edith Wharton, b. January 24, 1862, d. 1937
Edith Wharton was once associated with a single, somewhat uncharacteristic book, Ethan Frome (1911), but now she is rightly recognized, along with Henry James, as a masterful chronicler of life in early twentieth-century New York. Although born into one of the wealthiest families in the world, she worked hard all her life to produce several dozen novels, a dozen collections of short stories, and generous collection of non-fiction books, including an autobiography. Like George Eliot in England, she is a giant of American literature.
Suggested Reading Novels The House of Mirth, 1905. Ethan Frome, 1911. The Custom of the Country, 1913. The Age of Innocence, 1920. Short stories Twelve collections, 1899-1937. Non-fiction A Motor-flight Through France, 1908. French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919. In Morocco, 1920. The Writing of Fiction, 1925. Autobiography A Backward Glance, 1934.
Posted by: The Editors
Category: A Week in Literary History, Books and Authors | Link to this Entry
