Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
Keeping up with the Joneses is an idiom in many parts of the English-speaking world referring to the comparison to one's neighbor as a benchmark for social class or the accumulation of material goods. To fail to "keep up with the Joneses" is perceived as demonstrating socio-economic or cultural inferiority. The phrase was coined by a 1910s comic strip of the same name.
The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was her eighth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine Pictorial Review. Later that year, it was released as a book by D. Appleton & Company. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Though the committee had initially agreed to give the award to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street, the judges, in rejecting his book on political grounds, "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters'". The story is set in the 1870s, in upper-class, "Gilded Age" New York City. Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she was already established as a major author in high demand by publishers.
Ethan Frome is a 1911 book by American author Edith Wharton. It details the story of a man who falls in love with his wife's cousin and the tragedies which result from the ensuing love triangle. The novel has been adapted into a film of the same name.
The House of Mirth is a 1905 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City's high society around the end of the 19th century. The House of Mirth traces Lily's slow two-year social descent from privilege to a lonely existence on the margins of society. In the words of one scholar, Wharton uses Lily as an attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class."
The Great American Novel is the term for a canonical novel that generally embodies and examines the essence and character of the United States. The term was coined by John William De Forest in an 1868 essay and later shortened to GAN. De Forest noted that the Great American Novel had most likely not been written yet.
The Buccaneers is the last novel written by Edith Wharton. The story is set in the 1870s, around the time Wharton was a young girl. It was unfinished at the time of her death in 1937 and published in that form in 1938. Wharton's manuscript ends with Lizzy inviting Nan to a house party, to which Guy Thwaite has also been invited. The book was published in 1938 by Penguin Books in New York. After some time, Marion Mainwaring finished the novel, following Wharton's detailed outline, in 1993.
Percy Lubbock, CBE was an English man of letters, known as an essayist, critic and biographer. His controversial book The Craft of Fiction gained influence in the 1920s.
"Roman Fever" is a short story by American writer Edith Wharton. It was first published in Liberty magazine on November 10, 1934. A revised and expanded version of the story was published in Wharton's 1936 short story collection The World Over.
The Age of Innocence is a 1993 American historical romantic drama film directed by Martin Scorsese. The screenplay, an adaptation of the 1920 novel of the same name by Edith Wharton, was written by Scorsese and Jay Cocks. The film stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder and Miriam Margolyes, and was released by Columbia Pictures. The film recounts the courtship and marriage of Newland Archer (Day-Lewis), a wealthy New York society attorney, to May Welland (Ryder); Archer then encounters and legally represents Countess Olenska (Pfeiffer) prior to unexpected romantic entanglements.
Summer is a novel by Edith Wharton, which was published in 1917 by Charles Scribner's Sons. While most novels by Edith Wharton dealt with New York's upper-class society, this is one of two novels by Wharton that were set in New England. Its themes include social class, the role of women in society, destructive relationships, sexual awakening and the desire of its protagonist, named Charity Royall. The novel was rather controversial for its time and is one of the less famous among her novels because of its subject matter.
Howard Overing Sturgis was an English-language novelist who wrote about same-sex love. Of American parentage, he lived and worked in Britain.
Maureen Theresa Howard was an American novelist, memoirist, and editor. Her award-winning novels feature women protagonists and are known for formal innovation and a focus on the Irish-American experience.
The title of a book, or any other published text or work of art, is a name for the work which is usually chosen by the author. A title can be used to identify the work, to put it in context, to convey a minimal summary of its contents, and to pique the reader's curiosity.
The Glimpses of the Moon is a 1922 novel by Edith Wharton.
Augusta de Wit was a Dutch writer, born in the Dutch East Indies and best known for writing about Java.
Twilight Sleep is a novel by American author Edith Wharton and was first published in 1927 as a serial in the Pictorial Review before being published as a novel in the same year. The story, filled with irony, is centered around a socialite family navigating the New York of the Jazz Age and their relationships. This novel landed at number one on the best-selling list just two months after its publication and finished the year at number 7. Even as a best selling novel Twilight Sleep was not well received by critics at the time, who, while appreciating Wharton as a writer, struggled with the scenarios and characters she had created in the novel. While it was not considered as such in its own time period, today Twilight Sleep is widely considered to be a modernist novel as it employs modernist literary devices, such as an ever changing narration among the novel's characters and a close examination of the characters' self-identities and relationships with one another.
Hard Punishments, also sometimes referred to as Cather's Avignon story, is the final, unpublished, and since lost novel by Willa Cather, almost entirely destroyed following her death in 1947. It is set in medieval Avignon.
Cynthia Griffin Wolff is an American literary historian and editor known for her biographies of Edith Wharton and Emily Dickinson. She has served as Class of 1922 Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
