Roman Fever and Other Stories [Paperback]

A side from her Pulitzer Prize-winning talent as a novel writer, Edith Wharton also distinguished herself as a short story writer, publishing more than seventy-two stories in ten volumes during her lifetime. The best of her short fiction is collected here inRoman Fever and Other Stories.From her picture of erotic love and illegitimacy in the title story to her exploration of the aftermath of divorce detailed in Souls Belated and The Last Asset, Wharton shows her usual skill in dissecting the elements of emotional subtleties, moral ambiguities, and the implications of social restrictions, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff writes in her introduction.Roman Fever and Other Storiesis a surprisingly contemporary volume of stories by one of our most enduring writers.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 ol£$