Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist and short-story writer, born Edith Newbold Jones into the old New York society she would later anatomize. Educated at home and in Europe, she married unhappily, published her first novel at forty and in the next three decades wrote The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence, which in 1921 made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She settled permanently in France in 1911, organized relief work during the First World War and was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor.