WHARTON, EDITH NEWBOLD g6 ( ,1_ _2-1937), Amer ican writer, the daughter of George and Lucretia Jones, was born in New York city, and was educated at home, but spent most of her later life in Italy and France. In 1885 she married Edward Wharton, a Boston banker, and a few years later she began her literary career by contributing poems and short stories to Scrib ner's Magazine. The House of Mirth (19o5) definitely estab lished her reputation. The very brief novel Ethan Frome 09'0 is comparable only to the work of Hawthorne in the grimness of its tragedy of New England love and frustration. Her splendid sense of character, her cutting irony, her technique-in which she shows a decided kinship to Henry James-have secured for her a high place in American literature. Mrs. Wharton's long residence in Europe caused her to write a number of books of travel, such as Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), but her reputa tion rested chiefly on her novels and short stories. Among these
are: Crucial Instances 0900; The Fruit of the Tree (19o7); Xingu and Other Stories (1916) ; The Age of Innocence (192o); A Son at the Front (1923) ; the four volumes portraying the life of old New York : False Dawn, a story of the '4os, The Old Maid, the '5os, The Spark, the '6os, and New Year's Day, the '7os, published together in 1924; the novels Twilight Sleep (1927), The Children (1928), and Hudson River Bracketed (1929). She discussed her own method in The Writing of Fiction (1925).
See L. M. Melish, Bibliography of the Collected Writings of Edith Wharton (1927) and R. M. Lovett, Edith Wharton (1925).