About the Author

Edith Wharton(1862-1937) is a central figure in American literature, a masterful chronicler of her age and prolific writer in many modes. Her major works includeThe House of Mirth(1905),Ethan Frome(1911),The Custom of the Country(1913) andThe Age of Innocence(1920), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded to a woman.

Louis Auchincloss, editor of this volume, was the author of more than fifty works of fiction, literary criticism, biography, and history, and like Wharton before him held the distinction of being his generation's foremost chronicler of New York society. He edited two volumes of the writings of Theodore Roosevelt for The Library of America.