(Full name Edith Newbold Jones Wharton) American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and autobiographer.

Wharton is best known as a novelist of manners whose fiction detailed the cruel excesses of aristocratic society in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her carefully crafted, psychologically complex novels, novellas, and short stories reflect concern for the status of women in society as well as for the moral decay she observed underlying the outward propriety of the upper classes. While her subject matter, tone, and style have often been compared with those of her friend and mentor Henry James, Wharton has achieved critical recognition as an original chronicler of the conflict between the inner self and social convention. Aside from her numerous tales of the supernatural, collected as Ghosts in 1937, Wharton's writings generally eschew overt Gothic machinery, while many nevertheless evoke the...