Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist born into the old New York society she spent her career anatomising. She published more than forty books, including The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She settled permanently in France and was decorated for her relief work there during the First World War.