![]() ![]() In 1910 Wharton moved permanently to France, where in 1916 she was named an officer of the Legion of Honor for her wartime work on behalf of refugees. Wharton was a prolific writer, writing in total 22 novels and novellas, 87 short stories, nine volumes of nonfiction, and two volumes of poetry. In a letter to her friend Bernard Berenson, Wharton called Ethan Frome a large, long-legged hobbledehoy of a young novel (qtd. I first read this haunting, wintery tale in high. Over that same period, however, her marriage unraveled, and ended in divorce in 1913. Its the book that introduced me to Wharton, my all time favorite author. ![]() She achieved literary celebrity with The House of Mirth (1905), followed by Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize, becoming the first woman to achieve that distinction. Married off at 23 to Teddy Wharton, a wealthy Bostonian, Wharton did not begin to write full-time and publish novels until she was in her 40s, when she was living in Lenox, MA. First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is widely regarded as Edith Whartons most revealing novel and her finest achievement in fiction. Born Edith Newbold Jones to socially prominent middle-class parents (the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" refers to two of her great-aunts), Edith Wharton's literary ambitions surprised and slightly embarrassed her merchant-class family. ![]()
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