Happy Birthday, Edith Wharton

Edith Newbold Jones Wharton was born 159 years ago today. She was sharp-eyed and fiercely curious, haunted by ghosts as a child, and by lesser men as an adult (among those men: her abusive, embezzling, mentally-ill husband Teddy, whom she ultimately divorced). She repeatedly turned her shrewd and unsparing eye on her own upper-crust social class, earning her the nickname “the Angel of Devastation” from Henry James. She published 40 books in as many years, and was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (this award that is not without some controversy, as the jury had already voted to award the Prize that year to Sinclair Lewis, for MAIN STREET only to have the decision overturned by the committee). She was patrician. She was driven. She was clever. She was complicated.

Happy birthday, Edith. Thank you for your books, and your wit, and your keen observations, and your determination, and your legacy. Thank you, above all, for the inspiration.