Edith Wharton

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Edith Wharton (born Edith Newbold Jones, 1862 – 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, and designer.

Wharton portrayed the Gilded Age's life and morals by relying on her insider's knowledge of the upper class New York "aristocracy" to accurately represent the period's life and morals.

In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

In 1996, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Early life

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander at their brownstone on West Twenty-third Street in New York City on January 24, 1862 to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. "Pussy Jones" was a nickname she used to describe her friends and relatives. Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward Edward were her two older siblings. Frederic married Mary Cadwalader Rawle; their daughter, Beatrix Farrand, was born in France. Edith was baptized at Grace Church on April 20, 1862, Easter Sunday.

The Joneses, Wharton's paternal family who made their money from real estate, were a wealthy and socially influential family who had no interest in real estate. The phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" is believed to refer to her father's family. She was related to Rensselaers, the most prominent of the old patroon families, who had been given land grants from the former Dutch government of New York and New Jersey. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, her father's first cousin, was a teenager. Ebenezer Stevens, the maternal great-grandfather of Wharton's maternal grandmother, was named in New York as the Revolutionary War hero and General.

Wharton was born during the Civil War; however, in describing her family's life, Wharton does not mention the war; only that their travels to Europe after the war were due to the depreciation of American currency. The Jones family lived in France, Italy, Germany, and Spain from 1866 to 1872. The young Edith learned French, German, and Italian during her travels. She had typhoid fever, which almost killed her, at the age of nine, while the family was at a spa in the Black Forest. After the family returned to the United States in 1872, they spent their winters in New York City and their summers in Newport, Rhode Island. She was educated by tutors and governesses while living in Europe. She debuffed the fashion and etiquette that were traditionally expected of teenage girls at the time, which were supposed to encourage women to marry well and to be on display at balls and parties. These fashions were superficial and obscene, according to her. Edith wanted more education than she was given, so she read books from her father's library and the libraries of her father's relatives. Edith obeyed this order after her mother forbaded her from reading novels until she was married.

Wharton wrote and shared tales from a young age. She began "making up" as her family migrated to Europe when she was only four or five years old. She invented stories for her family and walked with an open book, with the pages turning the pages as if reading rather than improvising a story. As a young child, Wharton began writing her first book at age 11. Her mother's criticism stifled her aspiration, prompting her to try poetry. At age 15, she published her first published work, a translation of a German poem "Was Die Steine Erzählen" ("What the Stones Tell") by Heinrich Karl Brugsch ("What the Stones Tell"), for which she was paid $50. Since writing was not considered a legitimate occupation for a society woman of her time, her family did not want her name to appear in print. As a result, the poem was published under the name of a friend's father, E. A. Washburn, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson who advocated for women's education. Fast and Loose, a novella that she wrote in 1877, was under the age of 15. Verses, her father's 1878-1978 mother, arranged for the publication of a series of two dozen original poems and five translations. In the New York World in 1879, Wharton published a poem under a pseudonym. She had five poems published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, a prestigious literary journal in 1880. Despite these early successes, she was not encouraged by her family or her social circle, and although she continued to write, she did not publish anything more until her poem "The Last Giustiniani" was published in Scribner's Magazine in October 1889.

Wharton wrote for the New York upper crust between 1880 and 1890, but she continued to participate in the New York upper class's social traditions. She was keenly aware of the social shifts around her, which she later used in her writing. In 1879, Wharton emerged as a debutante to society. For the first time at a December dance hosted by a Society matron, Anna Morton, she was allowed to bare her shoulders and braid her hair up. Henry Leyden Stevens, the son of Paran Stevens, a wealthy hotelier and real estate investor from rural New Hampshire, began a courtship. Arthur Paget's sister Minnie married Arthur Paget. Stevens was not approved by the Jones family.

The Jones family returned to Europe in 1881 for her father's wellbeing in the middle of her debutante season. Despite this, George Frederic Jones died of a stroke in Cannes in 1882. During this period, Stevens was living in Europe with the Jones family. Wharton and her mother returned to the United States, where she learned they were married in August 1882. The wedding took place in the month the two people were supposed to marry, but the proposal was soon ended.

Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, Wharton's mother, went back to Paris in 1883 and died there until her death in 1901.

Wharton married Edward Robbins (Teddy) Wharton, who was 12 years old at the Trinity Chapel Complex in Manhattan, on April 29, 1885, at the age of 19. He grew up in a Boston family and was a gentleman of the same social class who shared her passion for traveling. The Whartons built a house at Pencraig Cottage in Newport's Pencraig Cottage. They bought a house on the other side of Newport in 1893 for $80,000 and moved into it. With the support of designer Ogden Codman, Wharton adorned Land's End. The Whartons bought 884 Park Avenue in New York in 1897. They traveled around the world from February to June, many visiting Italy, but also Paris and England, between 1886 and 1897. Three passions dominated Wharton's life: American houses, writing, and Italy.

Teddy Wharton suffered from acute depression from the late 1880s to 1902, and the couple has since stopped traveling. After a life of almost entirely at their Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, their depression became more apparent as a chronic illness. Wharton herself was said to have health problems with asthma and also periods of depression during those same years.

Teddy Wharton's mental illness was found to be incurable in 1908. In the year 2000, Wharton began an affair with Morton Fullerton, an author and foreign reporter for The Times of London, in which she discovered an intellectual partner. Edward Wharton was divorced in 1913 after 28 years of marriage. She was also beset by vehement critiques issued by the naturalist writers at the time.

Wharton wrote at least 85 short stories in addition to novels. She was also a garden designer, an interior designer, and a nostalgic explorer. Ogden Codman co-authored several design books, including her first major published work The Decoration of Houses (1897), which was co-authored by Ogden Codman. The generously illustrated Italian Villas and Their Gardens of 1904, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish, is another of her "home and garden" books.

She has successfully crossed the Atlantic 60 times. Italy, France, and England were her key destinations in Europe. She also went to Morocco in North Africa. She wrote several books about her travels, including Italian Backgrounds and A Motor-Flight through France.

Edward Wharton's wife told her about her love of travel, and for many years, they lived in Italy, mainly in Italy. Egerton Winthrop, their companion, followed them on several journeys there. The Whartons and their companion James Van Alen took a cruise around the Aegean islands in 1888. When Wharton was 26, he was 26. The trip cost the Whartons $10,000 and lasted four months. During this trip that was supposed to be lost, she kept a travel diary, but it was later published as The Cruise of the Vanadis, which was then regarded as her first known travel writing.

Edith Wharton, a former U.S. Open Tennis Championship runner-up who became governor of Rhode Island, purchased Land's End in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1897. At the time, Wharton described the main house as "incurably ugly." Wharton decided to pay $80,000 for the house, but thousands more to update the house's facade, decorate the interior, and landscape the grounds.

Wharton's Lenox, Massachusetts, which today stands as an example of her design principles, built in 1902. She wrote several of her books there, including The House of Mirth (1905), the first of many chronicles of life in old New York. At The Mount, she entertained the crème of American literary culture, including her close friend, novelist Henry James, who referred to the estate as "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond." Although she travelled around Europe almost every year with her friend, Egerton Winthrop (John Winthrop's descendant), the Mount was her primary residence until 1911. Wharton was frequently driven to appointments by her longtime chauffeur and mentor Charles Cook, a native of nearby South Lee, Massachusetts, when living there and going to another country. When her marriage suffered, she decided to move permanently to France, living first at 53 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II.

When World War II broke out, Wharton was planning to go on vacation for the summer. Though many people had left Paris, she returned to her Rue de Varenne apartment for four years as a devoted and ardent promoter of the French war effort for four years. The opening of a workroom for unemployed women in August 1914 was one of the first causes she undertook; here they were fed and paid one franc per day. The sewing market soon soared to 60, and the 30 women's sewing industry flourished. When the Germans invaded Belgium in the fall of 1914, she helped them establish the American Hostels for Refugees, which helped them obtain food, meals, and clothing, and then formed a career center to support them in seeking jobs. More than $100,000 was raised on their behalf by the woman. She founded the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee in early 1915, which provided shelter to nearly 900 Belgian refugees who had fled when their homes were bombed by the Germans.

aided by her prominent links in France's government, she and her long-time friend Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris) were among the few foreigners permitted to travel to the front lines during World War I. She and Berry went on five journeys between February and August 1915, which Wharton outlined in a sequence of articles that were first published in Scribner's Magazine and then as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, which became an American bestseller. Wharton and Berry travelled by car through the war zone, seeing one devastated French village after another. She toured the trenches and was within earshot of an artillery blast. "We woke to a raging noise of guns getting closer and more incessant," she said, "and as we went out into the streets, it seemed as if a new army had emerged from the ground."

She spent tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees, the wounded, the unemployed, and the homeless throughout the war. She was a "heroic servant on behalf of her adopted country." Raymond Poincaré, France's then-president, received the Legion of Honour, the country's highest award, on April 18, 1916, for her service to the war effort. Her relief efforts included creating workrooms for unemployed French women, arranging concerts to provide musicians, raising tens of thousands of dollars for the war effort, and opening tuberculosis hospitals. Among other things, Wharton edited The Book of the Homeless in 1915, which included essays, art, poetry, and musical scores by many leading European and American artists, including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, William Dean Howells, Anna de Noailles, Jean Cocteau, and Walter Gay. Scribner's Wharton suggested the book to her publisher. She oversaw all of the company's meetings, lined up contributors, and translated the French entries into French. Theodore Roosevelt wrote a two-page introduction in which he lauded Wharton's service and urged Americans to support the war. She also continued to write books, short stories, and poems during the war, as well as reporting for The New York Times and keeping up her extensive correspondence. Wharton urged Americans to support the war effort and encouraged America to join the war. Summer, 1916, the war novella The Marne, 1918, and A Son at the Front in 1919 were both published, but it was not published until 1923). She watched the Victory Parade from the balcony of a friend's apartment as the war came to an end. She left Paris in favour of the peace and quiet of the countryside after four years of arduous struggle. In Saint-Brice-Sous-Fort, Wharton purchased an 18th-century home on seven acres of land, which she described as Pavillon Colombe. She lived there in summer and autumn for the remainder of her life. At Sainte Claire du Vieux Chateau in Hyères, she spent winters and springs on the French Riviera.

Wharton proclaimed herself as a "rabid imperialist" in her role as a "rabid imperialist," and the conflict solidified her political convictions. Following the war, she travelled to Morocco as the guest of Resident General Hubert Lyautey and wrote a book titled In Morocco about her experience. Wharton's book about her Moroccan travels is full of praise for the French government, as well as Lyautey and his wife in particular.

She divided her time between Hyères and Provence, where she wrote The Age of Innocence in 1920. She returned to the United States only once after the war to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1923.

The Age of Innocence (1920) received the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making Wharton the first woman to win the award. The three fiction judges, literary historian Stuart Pratt Sherman, literature scholar Robert Morss Lovett, and novelist Hamlin Garland, voted to give the award to Sinclair Lewis for his satire Main Street, but Columbia University's advisory board, led by conservative university president Nicholas Murray Butler, reversed course and awarded the prize to The Age of Innocence. In 1927, 1928, 1930, and 1930, she was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide were all her guests at one time or another. Theodore Roosevelt, Bernard Berenson, and Kenneth Clark were all valued friends. F. Scott Fitzgerald's meeting with her letters was "one of the few well-known failed encounters in American literary annals," the editors of her books characterized as "one of the most well-known failed encounters in the American literary annals." Her books were published in both French and English, and she spoke fluent French, Italian, and German.

Wharton's autobiography A Backward Glance was released in 1934. In honor of Judith E. Funston, who wrote about Edith Wharton in American National Biography, Judith Wharton wrote about it.

Wharton died on June 1, 1937, while visiting her French country home (shared with Ogden Codman), where she was working on a new version of The Decoration of Houses when she suffered a heart attack and collapsed.

Le Pavillon Colombe, her 18th-century home on Rue de Montmorency in Saint-Brice-sous-Fort, died of a stroke on August 11, 1937. She died at 5:30 p.m., but her burial was not announced in Paris. Mrs. Royall Tyler, her companion, was at her bedside at her bedside. "With all the respects due to a war hero and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor," Wharton was buried in Versailles's American Protestant section. "A group of one hundred friends performed a verse of the hymn "O Paradise."

Early writing

Wharton wrote and told tales from a young age. When her family migrated to Europe when she was only four or five years old, she began "making up." She invented stories for her family and rode with an open book, flipping the pages as if reading instead of improvising a story. As a youth, Wharton began writing her first book at age eleven. Her mother's sarcastics stifled her aspirations, prompting her to poetry. Her first published work at age 15, a German poem "What the Stones Tell") by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, a translation of a German poem "Was die Steine Erzählen" ("What the Stones Tell") by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, was $100. Since writing was not considered a legitimate occupation for a society woman of her time, her family did not want her name to appear in print. The poem was therefore published under the name of a friend's father, E. A. Washburn, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson who advocated for women's education, so it was appropriate that it was released. In 1877, she wrote Fast and Loose, a cryptic novella. Verses, her father's 1878 father, arranged for the publication of a series of two dozen original poems and five translations. In the New York World in 1879, Wharton published a poem under a pseudonym. In 1880, she had five poems published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, a major literary magazine. Despite these early successes, she was not encouraged by her family or her extended family, and although she wrote more, she did not publish anything more until her poem "The Last Giustiniani" was published in Scribner's Magazine in October 1889.

Wharton put aside writing to participate in the New York upper crust's social rituals between 1880 and 1890. She was keenly aware of the social shifts around her, which she later used in her writing. In 1879, Wharton was officially admitted to society as a debutante to democracy. For the first time at a December dance hosted by a Society matron, Anna Morton, she was allowed to bare her shoulders and make her hair up for the first time. Henry Leyden Stevens, the son of Paran Stevens, a wealthy hotelier and real estate investor from rural New Hampshire, began a courtship. Minnie Paget married Arthur Paget. Stevens was not a fan of the Jones family.

The Jones family returned to Europe in 1881 for her father's health. Despite all of this, George Frederic Jones died of a stroke in Cannes in 1882. During this time, Stevens was living in Europe with the Jones family. Wharton and her mother, who were returning to the United States with her father, began their legal journey with Stevens, announcing their marriage in August 1882. The engagement suddenly ended the month the two were supposed to marry.

Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, Wharton's mother, came back to Paris in 1883 and died there until her death in 1901.

Wharton married Edward Robbins (Teddy) Wharton, a 12 year old at the Trinity Chapel Complex in Manhattan, on April 29, 1885, age 23, who was 19 years old. He was a sportsman and a gentleman of the same social class and shared her passion for travel from a well-established Boston family. The Whartons bought a house in Newport's Pencraig Cottage. They bought a house on the other side of Newport called Land's End in 1893 and moved into it. With the help of designer Ogden Codman, Wharton created Land's End. The Whartons bought 884 Park Avenue in 1897. Between 1886 and 1897, they travelled around the world from February to June, mainly visiting Italy, but also Paris and England. Wharton's life began with three passions: American houses, writing, and Italy.

Teddy Wharton suffered with acute depression from the late 1880s to 1902, and the couple then stopped traveling. His depression developed as a more serious illness after they lived almost entirely at Lenox, Massachusetts, where they lived almost entirely at The Mount. Wharton was reported to suffer from asthmatic issues as well as periods of depression during those same years.

Teddy Wharton's mental illness was determined to be incurable in 1908. In the year 2000, Wharton began an affair with Morton Fullerton, author and foreign correspondent for The Times of London, in which she found an intellectual partner. After 28 years of marriage, she divorced Edward Wharton in 1913. She was also beset with scathing comments by the naturalist writers at the same time.

Wharton wrote at least 85 short stories in addition to novels. She was also a garden designer, an interior designer, and a nostalgic food blogger. She wrote several design books, including her first published work, The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-authored by Ogden Codman. The generously illustrated Italian Villas and Their Gardens of 1904, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish, is another of her "home and garden" books.

She eventually crossed the Atlantic 60 times. Italy, France, and England were her top destinations in Europe. She also went to Morocco in North Africa. She wrote many books about her travels, including Italian Backgrounds and A Motor-Flight Through France.

Edward Wharton expressed her passion for travel and spent at least four months of each year outside of Italy, mainly in Italy. On several trips there, their friend Egerton Winthrop followed them. The Whartons and their companion James Van Alen took a cruise around the Aegean islands in 1888. Wharton was 26 years old at the time. The trip cost the Whartons $10,000 and lasted four months. During this trip that was supposed to be lost, she kept a travel journal, but The Cruise of the Vanadis was later released, marking her first known travel writing.

Edith Wharton, a former U.S. Open Tennis Championship runner-up who became governor of Rhode Island in 1897, purchased Land's End in Newport, Rhode Island. Wharton referred to the main house as "incurably ugly" at the time. Wharton decided to pay $80,000 for the house, but spent thousands more to upgrade the home's facade, decorate the interior, and landscape the grounds.

Wharton conceived The Mount, her Lenox, Massachusetts, which stands as an example of her design principles today. She wrote several of her books there, including The House of Mirth (1905), the first of many chronicles of life in Old New York. At The Mount, she entertained the cream of American literary society, including her close friend, novelist Henry James, who described the property as "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond." Despite spending months in Europe almost every year with her friend, Egerton Winthrop (John Winthrop's descendant), the Mount was her primary residence until 1911. Wharton was usually driven to appointments by her longtime chauffeur and colleague Charles Cook, a resident of nearby South Lee, Massachusetts, when living there and visiting abroad. When her marriage depressed, she decided to migrate permanently to France, residing first at 53 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II.

When World War I broke out, Wharton was planning to vacation for the summer. Despite many people left Paris, she returned to her Paris apartment on the Rue de Varenne and spent four years as a tireless and ardent promoter of the French war effort. The opening of a workroom for unemployed women in August 1914 was one of the first causes she undertook; here they were fed and paid one franc a day. What started with 30 women soon expanded to 60, and their sewing industry flourished. When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914 and Paris was flooded with Belgian refugees, she helped them to establish the American Hostels for Refugees, which provided them with shelter, meals, and clothing, and then established an employment agency to assist them in seeking jobs. She earned more than $100,000 on their behalf. She founded the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee in 1915, which provided shelter to nearly 900 Belgian refugees who had fled after their homes were bombed by the Germans.

She and her long-time friend Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris) were among the few foreigners in France allowed to travel to the front lines during World War I, aided by her celebrity in the French government. Wharton's Magazine and later called Fighting France, she and Berry went on five journeys between February and August 1915, which Wharton described in a series of articles that were first published in Scribner's Magazine and later as Combat France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, which became an American bestseller. Wharton and Berry rode through the war zone, seeing one devastation French village after another on a tour. She toured the trenches and was within earshot of an artillery fire. "We woke to a slew of guns, and it seemed as if a new army had sprouted out of the ground overnight."

She volunteered tirelessly for refugees, the wounded, the unemployed, and the homeless during the war. She was a "heroic servant on behalf of her adopted country." Raymond Poincaré, France's then-president, received the Legion of Honour, the country's highest award, on April 18, 1916, in recognition of her service to the war effort. Her relief efforts included setting up workrooms for young French women, arranging concerts to provide jobs for musicians, and opening tuberculosis hospitals. Wharton's book of the Homeless (1915) included essays, art, poetry, and musical scores by several major European and American writers, including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, William Dean Howells, Anna de Noailles, and Walter Gay, among other things. Wharton wrote the book for her publisher, Scribner's Scribner's. She was in charge of all of the company, gathered up contributors, and translated the French entries into French. In which he lauded Wharton's service and encouraged Americans to participate in the war, Roosevelt wrote a two-page introduction in which he praised the effort and advised Americans to donate $1 billion to the cause. She also continued to write books, short stories, and poems during the war, as well as reporting for The New York Times and keeping up her endless correspondence. Wharton urged Americans to support the war effort and encouraged America to join the conflict. Summer, 1916, the war novella The Marne, in 1918, and A Son at the Front in 1919 were both published in 1916, but it wasn't until 1923). She watched the Victory Parade from the balcony of a friend's apartment when the war came to an end. She decided to leave Paris in favour of the peace and quiet of the countryside after four years of intense struggle. In Saint-Brice-sous-Fort, Wharton bought an 18th-century home on seven acres of property that she named Pavillon Colombe. She lived in summer and fall for the remainder of her life. At Sainte Claire du Vieux Chateau in Hyères, she spent winters and springs on the French Riviera.

Wharton proclaimed herself as a "rabid imperialist," and the war solidified her political convictions. She travelled to Morocco as the guest of Resident General Hubert Lyautey and wrote a book titled In Morocco about her experience after the war. Wharton's essay about her Moroccan travels is brimming with praise for the French government and specifically Lyautey and his wife.

She divided her time between Hyères and Provence, where she finished The Age of Innocence in 1920. She returned to the United States only once after the war to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1923.

The Age of Innocence (1920) received the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making Wharton the first woman to win the award. The three fiction judges, literary scholar Stuart Pratt Sherman, literature scholar Robert Morss Lovett, and novelist Hamlin Garland, decided to award the award to Sinclair Lewis for his satire Main Street, but Columbia University's advisory board, led by conservative university president Nicholas Murray Butler, reversed their decision and awarded the award to The Age of Innocence. She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928, and 1930.

Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide were all her guests at one time or another. Theodore Roosevelt, Bernard Berenson, and Kenneth Clark were all important friends. F. Scott Fitzgerald's meeting as "one of the few well-known failed encounters in the American literary annals" was particularly notable. Many of her books were published in both French and English, and she spoke fluent French, Italian, and German.

Wharton's autobiography A Backward Glance, published in 1934, was released. In the case of Judith E. Funston, who wrote about Edith Wharton in American National Biography, she was an interviewer.

Wharton was at her French country home (shared with Ogden Codman), where she was working on a new version of The Decoration of Houses when she collapsed and died on June 1, 1937.

On August 11, 1937, she died of a stroke at Le Pavillon Colombe, her 18th-century home in Saint-Brice-sous-Fort. She died at 5:30 p.m., but her funeral was not announced in Paris. Mrs. Royall Tyler, her companion, was at her bedside at her bedside. "Wharton was buried in Versailles's Protestant section of the Cimetière des Gonards... "with all the respects due to a war hero and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor"..."

Travels and life abroad

She eventually crossed the Atlantic 60 times. Italy, France, and England were her key destinations in Europe. She also went to Morocco in North Africa. She wrote several books about her travels, including Italian Backgrounds and A Motor-Flight Through France.

Edward Wharton wrote about her love of travel, and the couple spent at least four months of each year in Italy, mainly in Italy. On several journeys there, their friend Egerton Winthrop joined them. The Whartons and their companion James Van Alen went on a cruise across the Aegean islands in 1888. Wharton was 26 years old at the time. The trip cost the Whartons $10,000 and lasted four months. During this trip that was supposed to be lost, she kept a travel journal, but The Cruise of the Vanadis was later published, which was then classified as her first known travel writing.

Edith Wharton, a former United States Open Tennis Championship runner-up who became governor of Rhode Island in 1897, purchased Land's End in Newport, Rhode Island. "Incurably ugly" at the time, Wharton characterized the main house as "incurably bad." Wharton decided to pay $80,000 to repair the house's facade, decorate the interior, and landscape the grounds.

Wharton built The Mount, a Lenox, Massachusetts, house that stands as an example of her design principles today. She wrote several of her books there, including The House of Mirth (1905), the first of many chronicles of life in old New York. At The Mount, she entertained the crème of American literary society, including her close friend, novelist Henry James, who referred to the estate as "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond." Despite the fact that she and her companion, Egerton Winthrop (John Winthrop's descendant), traveled in Europe nearly every year, the Mount was her primary residence until 1911. Wharton was often driven to appointments by her longtime chauffeur and companion Charles Cook, a native of nearby South Lee, Massachusetts, when living there and traveling abroad. When her marriage deteriorated, she decided to migrate permanently to France, living first in 53 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II.

When World War I broke out, Wharton was planning to vacation for the summer. Despite many people who had left Paris, she returned to her Paris flat for four years and was a devoted and ardent supporter of the French war effort for four years. The opening of a workroom for unemployed women in August 1914 was one of the first causes she took off; here they were fed and paid one franc a day. Women with 30 women soon doubled to 60, and their sewing industry flourished. She was helping to establish the American Hostels for Refugees, which helped them find jobs when the Germans invaded Belgium in the fall of 1914, when Paris was flooded with Belgian refugees. More than $100,000 was raised on their behalf by the actress. She founded the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee in early 1915, which provided security to nearly 900 Belgian refugees who had fled after their homes were bombed by the Germans.

She and her long-time friend Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris) were among the few foreigners in France to travel to the front lines during World War I, aided by her popular links in the French government. Between February and August 1915, she and Berry underwent five journeys, one in Scribner's Magazine and then as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, which became an American bestseller, which became an American bestseller. When traveling by car, Wharton and Berry rode through the war zone, seeing one devastated French village after another. She explored the trenches and was within earshot of an artillery fire. "We awakened to a stench of guns, and it seemed as if a new army had sprouted out of the ground" as we walked out into the streets.

She worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees, the wounded, the unemployed, and the homeless. She was a "heroic servant on behalf of her adopted nation." Raymond Poincaré, France's then-President, bestowed the Legion of Honour on April 18, 1916, in recognition of her service to the war effort. Her relief efforts included: creating workrooms for unemployed French women, arranging concerts to provide jobs for musicians, and opening tuberculosis hospitals. Wharton published The Book of the Homeless in 1915, which included essays, art, poetry, and musical scores by many leading contemporary European and American writers, including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, William Dean Howells, Anne de Noailles, and Walter Gay. Scribner's Wharton suggested the book to her editor. She oversaw all of the company's relationships, recruited contributors, and translated the French entries into French. Theodore Roosevelt wrote a two-page introduction in which he lauded Wharton's efforts and advised Americans to support the war. She also continued to write books, short stories, and poems during the war, as well as reporting for The New York Times and keeping up her slew of emails. Wharton pleaded with Americans to support the war effort and encouraged America to enter the conflict. A Son at the Front in 1919, 1917, she wrote the well-known romantic novel Summer in 1916, the war novella The Marne in 1918, and A Son at the Front in 1919 (though it wasn't published until 1923). She watched the Victory Parade from the balcony of a friend's apartment when the war ended. After four years of arduous attempts, she decided to leave Paris for the peace and quiet of the countryside. In Saint-Brice-Fort, Wharton bought an 18th-century home on seven acres of land, which she described as Pavillon Colombe. She lived in summer and autumn for the remainder of her life. At Sainte Claire du Vieux Chateau in Hyères, she spent winters and springs on the French Riviera.

Wharton, who described herself as a "rabid imperialist," was a devoted promoter of French imperialism, and the war solidified her political convictions. After the war, she returned to Morocco as the guest of Resident General Hubert Lyautey and wrote a book titled In Morocco about her travels. Wharton's book about her Moroccan travels is full of praise for the French government and especially for Lyautey and his wife in particular.

She divided her time between Hyères and Provence, where she completed The Age of Innocence in 1920. She returned to the United States only once after the war to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1923.

The Age of Innocence (1920) received the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making Wharton the first woman to win the award. The three fiction judges, literary scholar Stuart Pratt Sherman, literature scholar Robert Morss Lovett, and novelist Hamlin Garland, all voted to award the award to Sinclair Lewis for his satire Main Street, but Columbia University's advisory board, led by conservative university president Nicholas Murray Butler, reversed their decision and awarded the award to The Age of Innocence. In 1927, 1928, and 1930, she was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide were all her guests at one time or another. Theodore Roosevelt, Bernard Berenson, and Kenneth Clark were all respected colleagues. Her meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald was "one of the best-known failed encounters in the American literary annals," the editors of her letters characterized as "one of the most well-known failed encounters in the American literary annals." She was fluent in French, Italian, and German, and many of her books were published in both French and English.

Wharton's autobiography A Backward Glance was published in 1934. In the case of Judith E. Funston, a writer on Edith Wharton in American National Biography, she wrote about her.

Wharton was at her French country home (shared with Ogden Codman) when she collapsed on June 1, 1937, when she was at work on a new edition of The Decoration of Houses.

She died of a stroke at Le Pavillon Colombe on August 11, 1937, her 18th-century home on Rue de Montmorency in Saint-Brice-sous-Fort. She died at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, but her burial was not confirmed in Paris. Mrs. Royall Tyler, her companion, was at her bedside at her bedside. "With all the adornments owed to a war hero and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor," Wharton was buried in Versailles's American Protestant section.

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Career

Despite not publishing her first novel until she was forty, Wharton became an extraordinarily productive writer. In addition to her 15 novels, seven novellas, and eighty-five short stories, she published poetry, books on design, travel, literary and cultural criticism, and a memoir.

In 1873, Wharton wrote a short story and gave it to her mother to read. Her mother criticized the story, so Wharton decided to write only poetry. While she constantly sought her mother's approval and love, it was rare that she received either. From the start, the relationship with her mother was a troubled one. Before she was 15, she wrote Fast and Loose (1877). In her youth, she wrote about society. Her central themes came from her experiences with her parents. She was very critical of her work and wrote public reviews criticizing it. She also wrote about her own experiences with life. "Intense Love’s Utterance" is a poem written about Henry Stevens.

In 1889, she sent out three poems for publication. They were sent to Scribner's, Harper’s and Century. Edward L. Burlingame published "The Last Giustiniani" for Scribner’s. It was not until Wharton was 29 that her first short story was published. "Mrs. Manstey's View" had very little success, and it took her more than a year to publish another story. She completed "The Fullness of Life" following her annual European trip with Teddy. Burlingame was critical of this story but Wharton did not want to make edits to it. This story, along with many others, speaks about her marriage. She sent Bunner Sisters to Scribner's in 1892. Burlingame wrote back that it was too long for Scribner's to publish. This story is believed to be based on an experience she had as a child. It did not see publication until 1916 and is included in the collection called Xingu. After a visit with her friend, Paul Bourget, she wrote "The Good May Come" and "The Lamp of Psyche". "The Lamp of Psyche" was a comical story with verbal wit and sorrow. After "Something Exquisite" was rejected by Burlingame, she lost confidence in herself. She started travel writing in 1894.

In 1901, Wharton wrote a two-act play called Man of Genius. This play was about an English man who was having an affair with his secretary. The play was rehearsed but was never produced. Another 1901 play, The Shadow of a Doubt, which also came close to being staged but fell through, was thought to be lost, until it was discovered in 2017. Its world premiere was a radio adaptation broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2018. She collaborated with Marie Tempest to write another play, but the two only completed four acts before Marie decided she was no longer interested in costume plays. One of her earliest literary endeavors (1902) was the translation of the play, Es Lebe das Leben ("The Joy of Living"), by Hermann Sudermann. The Joy of Living was criticized for its title because the heroine swallows poison at the end, and was a short-lived Broadway production. It was, however, a successful book.

Many of Wharton's novels are characterized by subtle use of dramatic irony. Having grown up in upper-class, late-19th-century society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics, in such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

Versions of her mother, Lucretia Jones, often appeared in Wharton's fiction. Biographer Hermione Lee described it as "one of the most lethal acts of revenge ever taken by a writing daughter." In her memoir, A Backward Glance, Wharton describes her mother as indolent, spendthrift, censorious, disapproving, superficial, icy, dry and ironic.

Wharton's writings often dealt with themes such as "social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the new elite." Maureen Howard, editor of Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, notes several recurring themes in Wharton's short stories, including confinement and attempts at freedom, the morality of the author, critiques of intellectual pretension, and the “unmasking” of the truth. Wharton's writing also explored themes of “social mores and social reform” as they relate to the “extremes and anxieties of the Gilded Age”. These themes were expressed in her ghost stories, in which supernatural specters function as richly costumed variations on a theme of all-too-human cruelty.

A key recurring theme in Wharton's writing is the relationship between the house as a physical space and its relationship to its inhabitant's characteristics and emotions. Maureen Howard argues “Edith Wharton conceived of houses, dwelling places, in extended imagery of shelter and dispossession. Houses – their confinement and their theatrical possibilities…they are never mere settings."

American children's stories containing slang were forbidden in Wharton's childhood home. This included such popular authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Joel Chandler Harris. She was allowed to read Louisa May Alcott but Wharton preferred Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby. Wharton's mother forbade her from reading many novels and Wharton said she "read everything else but novels until the day of my marriage." Instead Wharton read the classics, philosophy, history, and poetry in her father's library including Daniel Defoe, John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Jean Racine, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, John Ruskin, and Washington Irving. Biographer Hermione Lee describes Wharton as having read herself "out of Old New York" and her influences included Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. H. Huxley, George Romanes, James Frazer, and Thorstein Veblen. These influenced her ethnographic style of novelization. Wharton developed a passion for Walt Whitman.

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