The breadth of Edith Wharton's achievement makes definition of her place in literary history difficult. For fifty years she wrote prolifically, and her audience ranged from scholars to readers of popular magazines. She produced short stories, ghost tales, novellas, novels, autobiography, literary criticism, and books on travel, landscape gardening, Italian architectural history, and interior decorating. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James she explored the ambiguities of inner experience and of human behavior as her characters attempt to achieve moral illumination and are inhibited from so doing by social convention. Like her friend Henry James she sought to relate values and patterns in American life to those in European cultures. Like the younger writers she admired, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, she produced excellent fictional commentaries on the values of contemporary American society although, unlike them, she lived only in Europe after 1912.

Wharton was at home with European...