Early Years and Marriage
A painting of Edith at age 8.
Edith Wharton was born as Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862 in New York. Her parents were George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, and their family was a prominent one in upper-class New York society. Edith had two brothers, Frederic and Henry, and they all had private tutors to homeschool them. Edith often travelled to Europe with her family and fellow-writer Henry James, and it was in Europe that she became enamored with literature. In 1885, Edith married wealthy Bostonian banker Edward Wharton, who was twelve years her senior. Her marriage gave her the opportunity to travel and the time to write, both of which she enjoyed very much. However, from the 1880's to 1902, Edward suffered from acute depression, growing worse until his mental state was diagnosed as incurable in 1908. Edith began an affair with journalist Morgan Fullerton in 1908 and divorced Edward in 1913.
"Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs." -Edith Wharton
"Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs." -Edith Wharton
Novels and Later Years
Edith Wharton in her later years.
As an adolescent, Edith wrote poetry and fiction, but her writing career officially started when her first book, The Decoration of Houses, was published in 1897. She is best known for her novels The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence. Many of her novels focus on the upper-class society among which she took part. The Age of Innocence, published in 1920, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 and was the closest of her novels to ridiculing the elite society of New York. She was the first women to win a Pulitzer Prize. Wharton befriended many other notable literary figures of the times, such as Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, and Jean Cocteau, and she was acquainted with Theodore Roosevelt as well. In 1923, Wharton received an honorary degree from Yale. In 1934, Wharton published an autobiography titled A Backward Glance. Edith Wharton died of a stroke on August 11, 1937 in France, where she spent her last years.