American novelist Edith Wharton was one of the great chroniclers of the Gilded Age.

She captured a world that is often wildly romanticized,

but she shows us that below the surface beauty and the glitter in the gold,

there were dark and often irreparable implications and conclusions.

Edith Wharton was born in New York City in 1862 at the height of the Civil

War and she died at her home outside of Paris in 1937 just before World War II broke out in

Europe. Despite her early years spent growing up in that very closed, restricted, regulated society

about which she wrote so critically, she chose to leave

both it and America and settle for the last third of her life permanently in France.

But as Wharton grew older, she returned with increasing regularity to New York in her mind

and in her fiction, and following World War I, she wrote perhaps her finest work,

The Age of Innocence.

Wharton's literary output was extraordinary. She published over 50 books, over 20 novels and

novellas, and in addition to fiction, she published works of travel writing, poetry, war-reporting,

landscape architecture, and interior design. travel writing, poetry, war reporting, landscape architecture, and interior

design. To many, perhaps, her most familiar works are her 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence,

and her dramatic novella set against a stark New England backdrop, Ethan Frome. But those only represent

a part of what Edith Wharton had to say.

Edith Wharton, as a writer and as a woman, was complex, held many layers of insight and

perception, and tackled some social, as well as very human conditions and situations that

perhaps weren't so innocent at all.

Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast where every two weeks we journey into corners light and dark for a look at America's Gilded Age, Francis Belipoc, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

...