Their Married Life In New York example essay topic
363 words
Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York City in 1862. She was the youngest child and only daughter of a socially prominent family. She was educated privately, in which case she spent most of her childhood traveling with her family in Europe, mostly in Italy and France. In 1885 at the age of twenty-three she did what she was expected to do and she married Edward "Teddy" Wharton, an affable Boston banker. The Wharton began their married life in New York and were soon part of the New York social scene, dividing their time between New York, Newport, and Bar Harbor. Later they built a home in Lenox, Massachusetts. But for Edith Wharton the year's high point was the couple's annual trip to Europe. Wharton was twenty-nine before she sold her first short story. Her first novel, The valley of Decision, set in eighteenth-century Italy, was published in 1902, when she was forty. It was in The House of Mirth, (1905), however, that she found her true subject: the tightly structured world of New York society into which she was born and which she observed with clarity and sympathetic irony. The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, is an in-bred world she both mocked and celebrated. An ambitious writer, in addition to her novels Wharton wrote masterful short fiction, ghost stories, and New England winter's tale, the grim novella Ethan Frome (1911).
She was also knowledgeable writer on such subjects as gardens, landscaping, furnishings, and travel. Divorced from Teddy Wharton in 1913, she spent almost no time in the United States, preferring Paris and her wide circle of friends, among them Henry James, who was a literary influence as well as a traveling companion, and Bernard Berenson. Wharton's surroundings where important to her and her personal wealth made possible the ordered and stylish life she craved. During World War I, Wharton remained in France and worked with refugees and the wounded, for which the French government warded her the Legion of Honor in 1916. She died at Saint-Bricesouis-Foret, France, in 1937.
