The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

The New York Stories of Edith Wharton
Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2011-08-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590174364

These 20 short stories and novellas offer an exquisite portrait of Old New York, spanning from the Civil War through the Gilded Age (New York Times). “Edith Wharton . . . remains one of the most potent names in the literature of New York.” —New York Times Edith Wharton wrote about New York as only a native can. Her Manhattan is a city of well-appointed drawing rooms, hansoms and broughams, all-night cotillions, and resplendent Fifth Avenue flats. Bishops’ nieces mingle with bachelor industrialists; respectable wives turn into excellent mistresses. All are governed by a code of behavior as rigid as it is precarious. What fascinates Wharton are the points of weakness in the structure of Old New York: the artists and writers at its fringes, the free-love advocates testing its limits, widows and divorcées struggling to hold their own. The New York Stories of Edith Wharton gathers twenty stories of the city, written over the course of Wharton’s career. From her first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” to one of her last and most celebrated, “Roman Fever,” this new collection charts the growth of an American master and enriches our understanding of the central themes of her work, among them the meaning of marriage, the struggle for artistic integrity, the bonds between parent and child, and the plight of the aged. Illuminated by Roxana Robinson’s introduction, these stories showcase Wharton’s astonishing insight into the turbulent inner lives of the men and women caught up in a rapidly changing society.

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton
Author: Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 592
Release: 1975
Genre: Authors, American
ISBN: 9780099358916

Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture

Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture
Author: Julie Olin-Ammentorp
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496216903

Edith Wharton and Willa Cather wrote many of the most enduring American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, including Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, and Cather’s O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Yet despite their perennial popularity and their status as major American novelists, Wharton (1862–1937) and Cather (1873–1947) have rarely been studied together. Indeed, critics and scholars seem to have conspired to keep them at a distance: Wharton is seen as “our literary aristocrat,” an author who chronicles the lives of the East Coast, Europe-bound elite, while Cather is considered a prairie populist who describes the lives of rugged western pioneers. These depictions, though partially valid, nonetheless rely on oversimplifications and neglect the striking and important ways the works of these two authors intersect. The first comparative study of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather in thirty years, this book combines biographical, historical, and literary analyses with a focus on place and aesthetics to reveal Wharton’s and Cather’s parallel experiences of dislocation, their relationship to each other as writers, and the profound similarities in their theories of fiction. Julie Olin-Ammentorp provides a new assessment of the affinities between Wharton and Cather by exploring the importance of literary and geographic place in their lives and works, including the role of New York City, the American West, France, and travel. In doing so she reveals the two authors’ shared concern about the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States.

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton
Author: Hermione Lee
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 914
Release: 2008-12-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307555852

From Hermione Lee, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, comes a superb reexamination of one of the most famous American women of letters.Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton-tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born into a wealthy family, Wharton left America as an adult and eventually chose to create a life in France. Her renowned novels and stories have become classics of American literature, but as Lee shows, Wharton's own life, filled with success and scandal, was as intriguing as those of her heroines. Bridging two centuries and two very different sensibilities, Wharton here comes to life in the skillful hands of one of the great literary biographers of our time.

Edith Wharton at Home

Edith Wharton at Home
Author: Richard Guy Wilson
Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2012-09-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1580933289

The Mount, Edith Wharton’s country place in the Berkshires, is truly an autobiographical house. There Wharton wrote some of her best-known and successful novels, including Ethan Frome and House of Mirth. The house itself, completed in 1902, embodies principles set forth in Wharton's famous book The Decoration of Houses, and the surrounding landscape displays her deep knowledge of Italian gardens. Wandering the grounds of this historic home, one can see the influence of Wharton’s inimitable spirit in its architecture and design, just as one can sense the Mount’s impact on the extraordinary life of Edith Wharton herself. The Mount sits in the rolling landscape of the Berkshire Hills, with views overlooking Laurel Lake and all the way out to the mountains. At the turn of the century, Lenox and Stockbridge were thriving summer resort communities, home to Vanderbilts, Sloanes, and other prominent families of the Gilded Age. At once a leader and a recorder of this glamorous society, Edith Wharton stands at the pinnacle of turn of the twentieth-century American literature and social history. The Mount was crucial to her success, and the story of her life there is filled with gatherings of literary figures and artists. Edith Wharton at Home presents Wharton’s life at The Mount in vivid detail with authoritative text by Richard Guy Wilson and archival images, as well as new color photography of the restoration of The Mount and its spectacular gardens. "The Mount was to give me country cares and joys, long happy rides and drives through the wooded lanes of that loveliest region, the companionship of dear friends, and the freedom from trivial obligations, which was necessary if I was to go on with my writing. The Mount was my first real home . . . its blessed influence still lives in me." —Edith Wharton, 1934

The Portable Edith Wharton

The Portable Edith Wharton
Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 692
Release: 2003
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780142437582

This unique collection is a rich representation of the works of one of the greatest 20th-century American writers, best known for her novels depicting the stifling conformity and ceremoniousness of the upper-class New York society into which she was born.

The Touchstone

The Touchstone
Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2014-07-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1473395453

This book contains Edith Wharton's first novella and the second book she ever wrote, 'The Touchstone'. This narrative follows Stephen Glennard, a young man whose destitution leads him into a dubious money-making scheme which he embarks on so that he can afford to marry the woman he loves. After seeing an advertisement seeking any papers or correspondences related to a recently deceased author that he had been in communication with, he snaps up the opportunity. A tale of how social strata, money, and self-deprecation can impact love, 'The Touchstone' is well worth a read and is not to be missed by fans and collectors of Wharton's prolific work. This classic text has been chosen for its immense literary value, and we are proud to republish it here, complete with a new introductory biography of the author. Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer.

The House of Mirth

The House of Mirth
Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: Modernista
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2024-05-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9180949347

In late 19th-century New York, high society places great demands on a woman—she must be beautiful, wealthy, cultured, and above all, virtuous, at least on the surface. At 29, Lily Bart has had every opportunity to marry successfully within her social class, but her irresponsible lifestyle and high standards lead her further and further down the social ladder. Her gambling debts are catching up with her, and an arrangement with a friend's husband causes society to begin questioning her virtue. The House of Mirth is Edith Wharton’s sharp critique of an American upper class she viewed as morally corrupt and relentlessly materialistic. EDITH WHARTON [1862–1937], born in New York, made her debut at the age of forty but managed to write around twenty novels, nearly a hundred short stories, poetry, travelogues, and essays. Wharton was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times: 1927, 1928, and 1930. For The Age of Innocence [1920], she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.

The Buccaneers

The Buccaneers
Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 417
Release: 1994-10-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 144062139X

Edith Wharton's spellbinding final novel tells a story of love in the gilded age that crosses the boundaries of society—soon to be an original series on AppleTV+! “Brave, lively, engaging...a fairy-tale novel, miraculouly returned to life.”—The New York Times Book Review Set in the 1870s, the same period as Wharton's The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers is about five wealthy American girls denied entry into New York Society because their parents' money is too new. At the suggestion of their clever governess, the girls sail to London, where they marry lords, earls, and dukes who find their beauty charming—and their wealth extremely useful. After Wharton's death in 1937, The Christian Science Monitor said, "If it could have been completed, The Buccaneers would doubtless stand among the richest and most sophisticated of Wharton's novels." Now, with wit and imagination, Marion Mainwaring has finished the story, taking her cue from Wharton's own synopsis. It is a novel any Wharton fan will celebrate and any romantic reader will love. This is the richly engaging story of Nan St. George and Guy Thwarte, an American heiress and an English aristocrat, whose love breaks the rules of both their societies.

Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s (LOA #271)

Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s (LOA #271)
Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: Library of America
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 159853453X

Acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee presents four “remarkable and surprising” books that collectively capture World War I and the Jazz Age through the eyes of one of our greatest novelists. Edith Wharton achieved the height of her critical and popular success in the 1920s, following The Age of Innocence, winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, with four works that, though less well-known today, reveal the same mastery of dramatic irony and penetrating social satire that place her, with Henry James and Willa Cather, among the foremost writers of her era. The Library of America now brings these brilliant works together for the first time in the fifth volume of its ongoing edition of Wharton’s works. Here are The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), a romance set amid the crosscurrents of upper-class social maneuvering that is considered by some scholars to have been a literary inspiration for The Great Gatsby; A Son at the Front (1923), set in Paris in the First World War, a searing character study of an American painter grappling with his son’s decision to answer the call of duty in the French army; Twilight Sleep (1927), a satire of the Jazz Age and the New York society ladies who turn to drugs, occultism, and other distractions to escape the pain and emptiness of their lives; and The Children (1928), an unlikely love story that editor Hermione Lee has called “a daring and profoundly sad book” and “the most remarkable and surprising of the novels that came after The Age of Innocence.” Also included is a chronology of Wharton’s life, newly expanded from Hermione Lee’s masterful biography of Wharton, as well as helpful explanatory notes. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.