The Custom of the Country may well be have been the lynchpin that made Edith Wharton's career become the phenomenon that comes so easily to memory across so many decades. Oh, it's of a cloth with all her work -- there's no mistaking that a page of her writing came from her and not someone else -- but on a certain level, this novel is a mean book, and the meanness is warranted. The heroine (a woman named Undine Spragg, of all things!) is a spoiled heiress who makes her way in life by conquering one man after another after another, moving from the American heartland eastward first to New York, and ultimately to Paris. "Edith Wharton's finest achievement." -- Elizabeth Hardwick

Author Biography

Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt.