Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Valley of Decision | 1902 |
| The House of Mirth | 1905 |
| The Fruit of the Tree | 1907 |
| The Reef | 1912 |
| The Custom of the Country | 1913 |
| Summer | 1917 |
| The Age of Innocence | 1920 |
| The Glimpses of the Moon | 1922 |
| A Son at the Front | 1923 |
| The Mother’s Recompense | 1925 |
| Twilight Sleep | 1927 |
| The Children | 1928 |
| Hudson River Bracketed | 1929 |
| The Gods Arrive | 1932 |
| The Buccaneers | 1938 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| The Touchstone | 1900 |
| Sanctuary | 1903 |
| Madame de Treymes | 1907 |
| Ethan Frome | 1911 |
| Bunner Sisters | 1916 |
| The Marne | 1918 |
| Old New York | 1924 |
| Fast and Loose | 1977 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| The Greater Inclination | 1899 |
| Crucial Instances | 1901 |
| The Descent of Man and Other Stories | 1904 |
| The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories | 1908 |
| Tales of Men and Ghosts | 1910 |
| Xingu and Other Stories | 1916 |
| Here and Beyond | 1926 |
| Certain People | 1930 |
| Human Nature | 1933 |
| The World Over | 1936 |
| Ghosts | 1937 |
Publication Order of Poetry Collections
| Verses | 1878 |
| Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse | 1909 |
| Twelve Poems | 1926 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Decoration of Houses (With: Ogden Codman) | 1897 |
| Italian Villas and Their Gardens | 1904 |
| Italian Backgrounds | 1905 |
| A Motor-Flight Through France | 1908 |
| Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort | 1915 |
| French Ways and Their Meaning | 1919 |
| In Morocco | 1920 |
| The Writing of Fiction | 1925 |
| A Backward Glance | 1934 |
| The Cruise of the Vanadis | 1992 |
About Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (born 1862, died 1937) was an American novelist and short story writer who drew on her insider’s knowledge of upper-class New York society to portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921 she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for “The Age of Innocence”. Her other best-known works are “The House of Mirth” and the novella “Ethan Frome”.
She was born Edith Newbold Jones in Manhattan on 24 January 1862, into a wealthy family that had made its money in real estate. The family lived in Europe from 1866 to 1872, where she was educated by tutors and governesses and became fluent in French, German and Italian. Her father arranged for a collection of her poems, “Verses”, to be privately printed in 1878. In 1885 she married Edward (Teddy) Wharton, and the couple divorced in 1913.
Her first major published work was a design book, “The Decoration of Houses” (1897), written with the architect Ogden Codman. She did not publish her first novel, “The Valley of Decision”, until 1902, when she was forty. In the same year she designed The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, where she wrote “The House of Mirth” (1905) and where the novelist Henry James, a close friend, was among her guests.
Wharton later settled permanently in France. During the First World War she stayed in Paris and organised relief work, opening workrooms for unemployed women and helping to set up the American Hostels for Refugees. France made her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1916, and her reports from the front were collected as “Fighting France”. She finished “The Age of Innocence” in 1920, received an honorary doctorate from Yale in 1923 and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930.
Alongside 15 novels she wrote novellas, books on travel and design, and at least 85 short stories, several of them ghost stories. Her autobiography, “A Backward Glance”, appeared in 1934. She died of a stroke on 11 August 1937 at her home in Saint-Brice-sous-Foret, and her unfinished novel “The Buccaneers” was published the following year. Screen versions of her work include Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence” (1993), Terence Davies’s “The House of Mirth” (2000) and the Apple TV+ series “The Buccaneers” (2023).
Photo: E. F. Cooper, Newport, Rhode Island (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).