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In a time when women were supposed to be seen and not heard, Edith Wharton emerged as one of the defining literary voices of her age.
Born to wealth and privilege, Wharton had a front row seat to the life of the burgeoning upper class in early 20th century America. She possessed an almost unique ability to look upon her contemporaries with the distanced and jaundiced eye of a social anthropologist.
In her books and articles, Wharton chronicled the clashes between the "old money" and the "nouveau riche" and had a keen eye for the social and sexual politics of the day.
One of her most famous and enduring works was The House of Mirth, a book that eviscerated the world of the newly rich and ostentatious. Her characters were thinly veiled versions of many of America's wealthiest individuals.
The decade covering 1910 to 1920 was a particularly fruitful one for Wharton. In short succession, she wrote Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), and The Custom of the Country (1913). Later in the decade, she wrote dispatches during World War I for various newspapers. At the end of the decade, she wrote her most acclaimed work, The Age of Innocence, which was published in 1920, and became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
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