Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was an American novelist born into the highest stratum of New York society — the world she would spend her career dissecting. Her novels The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920) — which won the Pulitzer Prize — are precise, cool examinations of how social conventions trap and destroy individuals. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction, and spent the second half of her life in France.