During the early decades of the twentieth century--at a time when New York City could ban women from smoking in public--one American woman published works which discussed love outside of marriage, scandal, class divisions, and poverty. Without apologies, she began to claim a place among the very best American novelists. Raised to disdain creative endeavors, this woman became an intellectual; cultivated for marriage, she divorced her husband; taught to obey the values of elite American society, she evaluated them. This woman, Edith Wharton, according to Gore Vidal, writing in The Edith Wharton Omnibus, "was never timid. Somehow in recent years a notion has got about that she was a stuffy grand old lady who wrote primly decorous novels about upper-class people of a sort that are no longer supposed to exist. She was indeed a grand lady, but she was not at all stuffy. Quite the contrary. She...