In 1921, Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature. Her nearly forty-year writing career spanned not only decades but also written genres, as she wrote everything from interior design manuals to first-hand accounts from the front in World War I. What she’s best known for, of course, is her beautifully crafted fiction. We’ll follow Wharton’s short stories through turn-of-the-century, upper-crust New York society, across France in World War I, and even through haunted New England landscapes. We will consider not only the exquisite craft of her work but also the historical and cultural contexts in which they were written.
Read: Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911–1937 (Edited by Maureen Howard 978-1-88301194-9)