The great American novelist and chronicler of the Gilded Age, Edith Wharton, was born in New York

City in January of 1862 in the middle of the Civil War, yet she died in France at age 75 at her home

outside of Paris where she had been living for many years. It is in celebration of Edith Wharton's birthday coming up on January 24th that I

wanted to take this deeply personal look at her life. For most readers, if there is one city to which

Wharton will be forever linked, it is New York. She lived herself inside that tight suffocating,

judgmental tribal world of the Gilded Age

that she chose to write about so critically

and to analyze with her razor-sharp insight and pen.

However, there is another city.

The Wharton used again and again in her work

and one in which she herself lived, loved, and finally flourished.

In fact, it's a city that created and molded, in effect, a different and a new Edith Wharton.

For me, the deeper story of Wharton's life takes place here, and to know her New York life is only part of the story.

In this episode, we are going to take a look at Edith Wharton's Paris, where she lived off and on, beginning in 1906,

finally settling permanently there in 1910, and eventually living exclusively in France until her death in 1937,

an entire period of 31 years almost half her life.

For me, in looking at Edith Wharton's relationship with New York, we find the keys and clues to her literary life.

But it is in looking at her life in Paris that we find the keys and clues to her literary life. But it is in looking at her life in Paris

that we find the keys and clues to her soul.

Thank you. Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast, where we take a journey into the world's light and dark of America's gilded age,

France's Belle-epoc and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Paris, from the end of the 19th century, up until the years of World War I, was a city that was

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