Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and critic celebrated for her incisive portrayals of wealth, social convention, and personal freedom. Born into a prominent New York family, she grew up within the privileged society she would later examine with unusual clarity and skepticism. Her intimate knowledge of its manners, expectations, and hypocrisies gave her fiction both authority and sharpness.Wharton wrote more than forty books, including novels, story collections, poetry, travel writing, and works on architecture and design. Her best-known books include The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Age of Innocence.During World War I, Wharton organized extensive relief work in France and was awarded the French Legion of Honor. Today, she is regarded as one of the major American writers of the twentieth century, admired for her elegant prose, psychological insight, and unsparing examination of the social forces that shape individual lives.