Edith Newbold Jones (Edith Wharton) (1862-1937) was born in New York City during the American Civil War. She enjoyed a diverse and very successful career as interior and garden designer, short story writer and award-winning novelist. It was The House of Mirth, published in 1905, that made Wharton famous, and in 1921 she became the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Her great novella Ethan Frome is also published in the Penguin English Library.

Edith Wharton was born into a wealthy New York family in 1862, during the American Civil War. She married at twenty-three, and subsequently divided her time between homes in New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The House of Mirth, perhaps her most famous work, appeared in 1905, and was followed by Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer and The Age of Innocence. Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She died in 1937.