Wharton’s Ethan Frome is published; it was inspired by the New England life the author witnessed near her home in Lenox. After first meeting him in 1909, Wharton visits art historian Bernard Berenson in Italy.
1913 Edith and Edward divorce. Wharton moves to France, where she will spend most of the rest of her life. Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! is published.
1914 Wharton travels to Tunisia and Algiers, then undertakes relief efforts during World War I. She finds homes for hun dreds of Belgian orphans and raises money for refugees.
1916 Wharton receives the French Legion of Honor award for her war relief activities. Henry James dies.
1917 T. S. Eliot’s book of poetry Prufrock and Other Observations appears.
1918 Willa Cather publishes My Ántonia.
1920 The Age of Innocence, a novel about New York society, is pub lished to great success.
1921 Wharton becomes the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she receives for The Age of Innocence. Eugene O‘Neill’s play Anna Christie opens in New York City.
1922 T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is published.
1923 Yale University awards Wharton an honorary doctorate. Edna St. Vincent Millay receives the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
1924 Wharton publishes a collection of novellas and short stories as Old New York.
1925 Sinclair Lewis publishes Arrowsmith, which he dedicates to Wharton. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is published; the author sends Wharton an inscribed copy. Gertrude Stein pub lishes The Making of Americans. Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs. Dalloway.
1926 Ernest Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises.
1928 Edward Wharton dies. Poet Carl Sandburg’s Good Morning, America is published.
1930 Wharton is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She continues to write, although her health is fail ing. Robert Frost’s Collected Poems is published.
1933 Wharton publishes Human Nature, a collection of short stories.
1934 Wharton publishes “Roman Fever” in Liberty magazine for the then-astronomical sum of $3,000; one of her best-known short stories, it is based on her travels in Italy. She continues to write and publish stories and novels. A Backward Glance, an autobiography, is published.
1937 After a severe stroke, Edith Wharton dies on August 11. She is buried in Versailles, France.
INTRODUCTION
Known as a chronicler of the moneyed and propertied classes of New York City, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was born during the Civil War and grew up in a traditional urban world of horse-drawn carriages and impressive brownstone residences. Her parents, Lucretia Rhinelander Jones and George Frederic Jones, came from socially prominent backgrounds. Edith thus represented a world of apparently sedate family life that extended back several generations. In her fiction she explored the manners, values, and codes of this complex social setting, and the conflicts her characters faced as the tides of change swept the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the years preceding her major works of long fiction, she established a solid reputation as an accomplished short story writer. Her interest in New York’s upper-crust society eventually led to a series of successful novels, most notably The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920).
Respectful of the education, manners, and good breeding that an upbringing in an old New York family afforded, Wharton was also sensitive to the cultural attractions and social traditions of Europe. Like her friend and sometimes mentor Henry James (1843-1916), she traveled widely in Europe, making her first trip to the Continent between 1866 and 1872, soon after the Civil War. After her marriage to Bostonian Edward “Teddy” Wharton in 1885, she and her husband traveled to Europe annually, usually from late winter to early spring, when they returned to their cottage on the family estate at Newport, Rhode Island. She conceived some of her more significant works in Europe, and she wrote extensively about life in England and on the Continent. If this exposure to Europe refined the historical and cultural awareness that her polished New York upbringing ingrained in her, she was also aware of the price that could be paid for living in culturally and economically impoverished surroundings. Wharton was an analyst of the private relations between men and women in financially secure families and stable social networks, but she was also fascinated by the deprivations of fragile people in the remote villages of New England. Although New York would continue to be the dominant force in her creative work, she devoted considerable attention in stories and novels to rural New England settings and characters.
Wharton’s New England was not a purely imaginative creation; she knew firsthand