Edith Wharton was an American novelist, short-story writer, designer, and critic whose work stands among the finest achievements of early twentieth-century American literature. Born Edith Newbold Jones in New York in 1862, she grew up inside the world of wealth, manners, inheritance, social discipline, and hidden constraint that she would later examine with extraordinary precision. Her fiction is known for its intelligence, elegance, irony, moral seriousness, and unsparing attention to the ways social systems shape private lives.Wharton's major works include The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Although she is often associated with the upper-class society of New York and Europe, Ethan Frome shows her equally powerful command of rural hardship, psychological confinement, and tragic emotional necessity. Her work remains essential to readers of classic American fiction, literary realism, women writers, psychological fiction, and novels of marriage, class, desire, and social pressure.
