Over the course of a long and astonishingly productive literary career that stretched from the early 1890s to just before World War II, Edith Wharton published nearly a dozen story collections, leaving a body of work as various as it is enduring. With this two-volume set, The Library of America pres[...]

This title includes three beloved novels by Edith Wharton, in a couture-inspired Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition designed by a fashion illustrator for Alexander McQueen. This edition celebrates the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton's birth in 2012. "The House of Mirth": Nineteen year old Lily Bart [...]

The original text of The Decoration of Houses continues without revision as an authentic classic, perhaps the most important book of its kind ever published. Its carefully reasoned chapters on such aspects of house interiors as fireplaces, ceilings and floors, halls and stairs, are of the greatest v[...]

The text of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1921 novel of desire and its implications in Old New York is accompanied by necessarily rigorous annotations. "Contexts" constructs the historical foundations of the novel, with documents on "The New York Four Hundred" elite social gatherings and ar[...]

As her marriage to an eminent and wealthy bachelor approaches, Kate Orme should feel nothing but bliss. Yet, when she learns of Denis' guilty secret she becomes painfully aware of her fiance's flawed morality. Determining that no child of hers should inherit such character traits, she does everythin[...]

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

Edith Wharton made the world of Old New York her own, the wealthy high society so powerfully depicted in these three elegantly ironic novels. Revolving around the marriage question, they explore the dilemma of women and men held within the rigid bounds of social convention. Thus in The House of Mirt[...]

Lily Bart has no fortune, but she possesses everything else she needs to make an excellent marriage: beauty, intelligence, a love of luxury and an elegant skill in negotiating the hidden traps and false friends of New York's high society. But time and again Lily cannot bring herself to make the fina[...]

The return of the beautiful Countess Olenska into the rigidly conventional society of New York sends reverberations throughout the upper reaches of society. Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingenue, when May's cou[...]

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton. 'It was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions'. A searing, shocking tale of women as consumer items in a man's world, "The H[...]

'If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.' This title features two moving stories of love, loss, desire and divorce, from one of the great chroniclers of nineteenth-century New York life. Introducing Little Black [...]