Biography edith wharton
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Edith Wharton () was born into a tightly controlled society at a time when women were discouraged from achieving anything beyond a proper marriage.
Wharton broke through these strictures to become one of America’s greatest writers. Author of The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth, she wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
“No children of my own age…were as close to me as the great voices that spoke to me from books. Whenever I try to recall my childhood it is in my father’s library that it comes to life…”
Childhood
Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones into a wealthy New York family on January 24, , at 14 West 23rdSt. The third child and only daughter of George Frederic
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I’m glad to be here today, because Wharton was a huge influence on my own work, and I think on that of most American fiction writers today. So we’re grateful to her.
Edith Newbold Jones was born—right here—in Hers was a small, privileged world, in which family was more important than wealth. This world was tribal and insular, with a rigid caste system and a strict code of behavior. The code was Puritanical, driven by moral rectitude, self-reliance, and stoicism. Self-control was essential; emotional display was anathema. To grow up in that society—and many of us here today did—was to know the enormous social forces implicit in the command, “Don’t make a scene.”
Edith learned the rules most particularly from her mother. Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones was well born, impecunious, and savagely snobbish. She was dedicated to the rules of decorum.
When Edith was a ung matron, unwittingly she let her new coachman resehandling her mother’s coach, as they both drove along the main street
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In her long career, which stretched over forty years and included the publication of more than forty books, Edith Wharton () portrayed a fascinating segment of the American experience. She was a born storyteller, whose novels are justly celebrated for their vivid settings, satiric wit, ironic style, and moral seriousness. Her characters, such as Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, Ethan Fromme, and the charming but ineffectual Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, are some of the most memorable in American literature. Often portrayed as tragic victims of cruel social conventions, they are trapped in bad relationships or confining circumstances. Her own life stands as an example of the obstacles that a woman of her time and place had to overcome to find self-realization.
Edith Wharton's writing career was launched one hundred years ago, with the publication of her first book, The Decoration of Houses, written with her architect friend, Ogden Codman. The two tastemakers denounce