Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, designer, and critic whose fiction captured the manners, ambitions, and moral pressures of upper-class society with extraordinary precision. Born into a wealthy New York family, she understood from the inside the codes of privilege, marriage, inheritance, reputation, and restraint that shaped the world she later examined in her novels and stories.Wharton's major works include The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer, and The Age of Innocence, for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her writing is admired for its elegance, psychological insight, social criticism, and unsentimental treatment of desire, duty, and the costs of conformity.In addition to fiction, Wharton wrote travel books, essays, criticism, and works on architecture and interior design. She spent much of her later life in France and was active in relief work during World War I. Today she is recognized as one of the major American writers of the twentieth century, a novelist whose work combines literary artistry with a sharp understanding of social power and human limitation.
