What was Edith Wharton's last book?
1775704#0
The Buccaneers is the last novel written by Edith Wharton. The novel is set in the 1870s, around the time Edith Wharton was a young girl. It was unfinished at the time of her death in 1937, and published in that form in 1938. Wharton's manuscript ends with Lizzy inviting Nan to a house party to which Guy Thwarte has also been invited. The book was published in 1938 by Penguin Books in New York. After some time, Marion Mainwaring finished the novel following Wharton's detailed outline of the novel in 1993.
The Buccaneers
160180#24
In 1934 Wharton's autobiography "A Backward Glance" was published. In the view of Judith E. Funston, writing on Edith Wharton in "American National Biography", What is most notable about "A Backward Glance," however, is what it does not tell: her criticism of Lucretia Jones [her mother], her difficulties with Teddy, and her affair with Morton Fullerton, which did not come to light until her papers, deposited in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, were opened in 1968.
Edith Wharton
1775704#7
Time Magazine also wrote an editorial on her last novel in 1938. It begins with, "Death last year ended Edith Wharton's work on a novel that might have been her masterpiece.She has written 29 chapters of a book apparently planned to run about 35 chapters. The story had reached its climax; the characters were at a moment in their careers when they were compelled to make irrevocable decisions. While Mrs. Wharton left notes suggesting how she intended to end the novel, she gave no hint of how she intended to solve its moral and esthetic problems."
The Buccaneers
23877158#0
"Afterward" is a short story by American writer Edith Wharton. It was first published in the 1910 edition of "The Century Magazine". and later reprinted in her books " The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton" and "Tales of Men and Ghosts" (1910). It is an ironic ghost story about greed and retribution. The ghost comes for one of the main characters long after a business transgression where the character wronged another.
Afterward
8522978#5
Julian Fellowes has cited "The Custom of the Country" as an inspiration for his creative work, including "Downton Abbey". Upon receiving the Edith Wharton Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts, Fellowes said: "It is quite true that I felt this was my book; that the novel was talking to me in a most extreme and immediate way. I think it's a remarkable piece of writing. In Undine Spragg, Wharton has created an anti-heroine absolutely in the same rank as Becky Sharp, Scarlett O'Hara, or Lizzie Eustace. Undine has no values except ambition, greed and desire, and yet through the miracle of Wharton's writing, you are on her side. That's what's so extraordinary about the book...I decided, largely because of her work, that it was time I wrote something."
The Custom of the Country
160180#4
Wharton wrote and told stories from an early age. When her family moved to Europe and she was just four or five she started what she called "making up." She invented stories for her family and would walk with an open book, turn the pages as if reading and improvise a story. Wharton began writing poetry and fiction as a young girl, and attempted to write her first novel at age eleven. Her mother's criticism quashed her ambition and she turned to poetry. At age 15, her first published work appeared, a translation of a German poem "Was die Steine Erzählen" ("What the Stones Tell") by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, for which she was paid $50. Her family did not want her name to appear in print, since writing was not considered a proper occupation for a society woman of her time. Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friend's father, E. A. Washburn, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson who supported women's education. In 1877, at the age of 15, she secretly wrote a 30,000 word novella ""Fast and Loose"." In 1878 her father arranged for a collection of two dozen original poems and five translations, "Verses," to be privately published. Wharton published a poem under a pseudonym in the New York World in 1879. In 1880 she had five poems published anonymously in the "Atlantic Monthly", an important literary magazine. Despite these early successes, she was not encouraged by her family or her social circle, and though she continued to write, she did not publish anything more until her poem "The Last Giustiniani" was published in Scribner's Magazine in October 1889.
Edith Wharton
1775704#5
Edith Wharton's final novel circulated positive and negative reactions from critics. It was often referred to by the New York Times as the "unfinished novel." The main questions asked by critics were: "Is this really her legacy?" and "Was there enough left of the book to publish in the first place?" According to close friends to Wharton such as her literary executor Galliard Lapsey stated the story was brought to her intended conclusion.
The Buccaneers
29415093#7
After the affair ended, Wharton, who was fiercely guarded when it came to her private life, requested that Fullerton destroy every letter she had ever sent him in order to avoid any scandal. The affair itself, although suspected, was not confirmed until the 1980s. Fullerton had ignored Wharton's request and had kept all of her letters, which were eventually published as a book, "The Letters of Edith Wharton", in 1988. The affair probably helped inspire an erotic fragment for "Beatrice Palmato", a novel that Wharton outlined but didn't pursue, given that the incestuous father-daughter relationship at its core would make it unpublishable.
William Morton Fullerton
528860#0
The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was her twelfth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine "Pictorial Review". Later that year, it was released as a book by D. Appleton & Company. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Though the committee had initially agreed to give the award to Sinclair Lewis for "Main Street", the judges, in rejecting his book on political grounds, "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters'". The story is set in the 1870s, in upper-class, "Gilded-Age" New York City. Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she had established herself as a strong author, with publishers clamoring for her work.
"The Age of Innocence" was a softer and more gentle work than "The House of Mirth", which Wharton had published in 1905, and which was set in the time of her childhood. In her autobiography, Wharton wrote of The Age of Innocence that it had allowed her to find "a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914." Scholars and readers alike agree that "The Age of Innocence" is fundamentally a story which struggles to reconcile the old with the new.
The Age of Innocence
160180#27
Despite not publishing her first novel until she was forty, Wharton became an extraordinarily productive writer. In addition to
her fifteen novels, seven novellas, and eighty-five short stories, she published poetry, books on design, travel, literary and cultural criticism, and a memoir.
Edith Wharton