Wharton’s Prize

Edith Wharton won a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for Age of Innocence and again in 1927 with Twilight Sleep.  Born into wealth as Edith Newbold Jones, she was married at age twenty-three to Teddy Wharton.  After nearly twenty-five years, she divorced in 1913 and then went on to have a number of highly publicized affairs.  She was strongly drawn to all things European and made cross-Atlantic trips sixty-six times, no slight undertaking in those days.  She was friends with all the big names of the age, including Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as Theodore Roosevelt.  Wharton continued writing until her death at age seventy-five in 1937 of an apoplectic stroke.  This Women in History brief has been brought to you by Love Lessons Learned from the Old West: Wisdom from Wild Women.  Visit www.chrisenss.com for more information.  Follow Chris Enss on Twitter, perhaps there she won’t refer to herself in the third person.