Edith Wharton
1862 - 1937
This was the childhood home of Edith Jones Wharton, one of America's most important authors at a time when 23rd street marked the northern boundary of fashionable New York. Here in her father's extensive library, young Edith Jones discovered the world of literature. Wharton wrote with authority on gardens and design but was most celebrated for her fiction. Her novels and stories and characterized by her intelligence perception and the grand beauty of her prose. She revealed the life of the soul with courage and clarity. Wharton lived in France for the better part of her life but the complex world of New York remained the source of her greatest fiction. This includes the House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence for which, in 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature.
Marker is on West 23rd Street.
Courtesy hmdb.org
