1862-1937
Novelist

An Elite Upbringing.

Edith Wharton, one of the leading American novelists of the 1900s and 1910s, was born Edith Jones to wealthy and conservative parents who were part of New York City's high society. Wharton had the best that money could buy. She was privately tutored, traveled to Europe, and married at the age of twenty-three in 1885 to a member of her family's set, Edward Wharton. However, Wharton disliked playing the role of society matron and hostess in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island, a wealthy summer resort area. A few years into her marriage, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Her doctor suggested that Wharton, who had written and had poems published as a child, should take up writing again as a cure for her nerves.

High Society.

Wharton's fiction chronicled the manners of New York City society from the 1840s through the...