Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, 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, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
Wharton, c. 1895
Portrait of Wharton as a child by Edward Harrison May (1870)
Edith Wharton by Edward Harrison May
The Mount, 2006
The Pulitzer Prizes are two-dozen annual awards given by Columbia University in New York for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters." They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
Columbia President Lee Bollinger presents the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Jeffrey Eugenides
Pulitzer Hall on the Columbia campus