Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast, where every two weeks we journey into world's light and dark of

America's Gilded Age, France's Belle-Epoch, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian

eras.

Each year as we celebrate the birthday of Edith Wharton on January 24th, and by the way,

20266, would have been her 164th year.

It's a special treat to delve into the unique and lesser explored aspects of her life and work.

Wharton is so crucially important to an exploration of the Gilded Age,

since, for one, she lived in that world,

and she wrote about it with the sharp eye and pen of a critical observer.

One could argue that no contemporary writer captured the grandeur along with the social violence of this complicated world as incisively as she.

Readers who know her major works, including her Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece, The Age of Innocence, published in 1920, or even the House of Mirth, her first great bestseller

published earlier in 1905, may realize that Wharton's first published book wasn't a work

of fiction at all. In 1897, Scribner's offered her a contract to publish a work of interior

design and one could say a sort of

architectural history. Her book co-authored with architect and interior designer Ogden Codman Jr.

was the fruit of her and Codman's deep passion for the balance, purity, and cohesiveness of what they saw as a long line of Italian,

French, and British design and architectural tradition. There was no such tradition here

in America at the time, and indeed, Wharton and Codman's volume has remained a significant

philosophical resource for designers to the

present day. But Wharton's fascination with creating an integrated unified living space

went beyond the idea of simply a decorating manual. Throughout her life, Wharton herself had indeed

sought a place to call home and indeed find that

...