Edith Wharton, Edith Newbold Jones, (1862, 1937), American author best known for her stories and novels about the upper-class society into which she was born.

Edith Jones came of a distinguished and long-established New York family. She was educated by private tutors and governesses at home and in Europe, where the family resided for six years after the American Civil War, and she read voraciously. She made her debut in society in 1879 and married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Boston banker, in 1885.

Although she had had a book of her own poems privately printed when she was 16, it was not until after several years of married life that Wharton began to write in earnest. Her major literary model was Henry James, whom she knew, and her work reveals James’s concern for artistic form and ethical issues. She contributed a few poems and stories to Harper’s, Scribner’s, and other magazines in the 1890s, and in 1897, after overseeing the remodeling of a house in Newport, Rhode Island, she collaborated with the architect Ogden Codman, Jr., on The Decoration of Houses. Her next books, The Greater Inclination (1899) and Crucial Instances (1901), were collections of stories.