Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, during the American Civil War. Wharton published her first short story in 1891; her first story collection, The Greater Inclination, in 1899; a novella called The Touchstone in 1900; and her first novel, a historical romance called The Valley of Decision, in 1902. The book that made Wharton famous was The House of Mirth, published in 1905. She died in 1937.
Wharton is not generally viewed as one of literature's great optimists, and yet, by the last chapter of The Age of Innocence, people are a little less hypocritical, a little more willing to see and accept the world. ... A larger life and more tolerant views that's the greatest promise the novel holds out to us, and it's as necessary now as it was when Edith Wharton put it into words. --Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot, from the foreword Will writers ever recover that peculiar blend of security and alertness which characterizes Mrs. Wharton and her tradition? --E. M. Forster