The House of Mirth, Wharton's second novel, was published in 1905 to immediate critical and popular acclaim. Her editor at Scribners noted that it enjoyed the publishing house's quickest sales of the time. In comparing the novel to Wharton's earlier works, many critics found its complexity, characterization, and emotional resonance to show her important advances as a writer. The New York Times Book Review praises Wharton as the "most scholarly and distinctive writer of fiction of the day," while the Saturday Review notes that it is "one of the few novels which can claim rank as literature." Review of Reviews has extremely high praise, announcing that The House of Mirth is "worked out in a manner to stamp the writer a genius, and give her name a place in the history of American literature." Writers as celebrated as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Dean Howells, Sinclair Lewis, and...