Ethan Frome [Paperback]

First published in 1911,Ethan Fromeis widely regarded as Edith Wharton's most revealing novel and her finest achievement in fiction. Set in the bleak, barren winter landscape of New England, it is the tragic tale of a simple man, bound to the demands of his farm and his tyrannical, sickly wife, Zeena, and driven by his star-crossed love for Zeena's young cousin, Mattie Silver. In its spare, chilling creation of rural isolation, hardscrabble poverty and wintry landscape, writes Alfred Kazin in his afterword, Ethan Fromeoverwhelms the reader as a drama of irresistible necessity. An exemplary work of literary realism in setting and character,Ethan Fromestands as one of the great classics of twentieth-century American literature.America's most famous woman of letters, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize,Edith Whartonwas born into one of the last leisured class families in New York City, as she put it, in 1862. Educated privately, she was married to Edward Wharton in 1885, and for the next few years, they spent their time in the high society of Newport (Rhode Island), then Lenox (Massachusetts) and Europe. It was in Europe that Wharton first met Henry James, who was to have a profound and lasting influence on her life and work. Wharton's first published book was a work of nonfiction, in collaboration with Ogden Codman,The Decoration of Houses(1897), but from early on, her marriage had been a source of distress, and she was advised by her doctor to write fiction to relieve her nervous tension. Wharton's first short stories appeared inScribner's Magazine,and though she published several volumes of fiction around the turn of the century, includingThe Greater Inclination(1899),The Touchstone(1900),Crucial Instances(1901),The Valley of Decision(1902),Sanctuary(1903), andThe Descent of Man and Other Stories(1904), it wasn't until 1905, with the publication of the bestsellingThl³.