The second Edith Wharton volume in The Library of America series contains five tales of Edith Wharton along with her autobiography and a previously unpublished autobiographical fragment.

"With this volume (a companion to Collected Stories 1911-1937), The Library of America presents the finest of Wharton's achievement in short fiction, drawn from the more than eighty stories she published over the course of her career. Here, in settings familiar and exotic, are all of Wharton's characteristic qualities and themes: her candid exploration of relations between the sexes; her satire, sometimes gentle, sometimes despairing, of social class...

Thousands of books on interior design have come and gone since the 1897 publication of this pioneering manual, but The Decoration of Houses remains, thanks to the insightful and inspiring advice of its co-authors. Before she became the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of “The Age of Innocence”, Edith Wharton was a society matron, remodeling a summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. With the able assistance of architect Ogden Codman, Jr., Wharton...

In his brilliant introduction to the present volume, the noted writer Gore Vidal makes this comment: "At best, there are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as 'major' and Edith Wharton is one. ... I can only say that I envy anyone reading for the first time The Age of Innocence or New Year's Day." In these works, as in most of Mrs. Wharton's fiction, her subject is America's upper classes as they flourished in the late 19th...

Set in rural New England, "Ethan Frome" is the story of its title character who marries Zenobia, a nagging hypochondriac of a woman, and finds himself trapped in an unfulfilling life. When Zenobia's young cousin Mattie Silver comes to live with them, Frome falls in love with her. "Ethan Frome" is the story of forbidden love and its tragic consequences. In "Summer" we have the story of the sexual awakening of a young woman, Charity Royall. Charity,...