Edith Wharton
(born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider’s knowledge of the upper class New York “aristocracy” to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth and the novella Ethan Frome.
Wharton began writing poetry and fiction as a young girl, and attempted to write her first novel at age eleven. At age 15, her first published work appeared, a translation of a German poem “Was die Steine Erzählen” (“What the Stones Tell”) by Heinrich Karl Brugsch At the age of 15, she secretly wrote a 30,000 word novella Fast and Loose. In 1878 her father arranged for a collection of two dozen original poems and five translations, Verses, to be privately published. In 1880 she had five poems published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, an important literary magazine. “The Last Giustiniani” was published in Scribner’s Magazine in October 1889.