When in 1925 his first novel „The Son of His Father” was published at the Chicago publishing house, then its circulation took twenty-seven freight cars. The „Son of His Father” was made near the Oracle, and his first show was in Tucson. A great adventure in the desert and mountain world of Arizona and the Mexican border. Adventure lovers will amuse by this novel.
Mina – the daughter of an unholy union – a mermaid taken by one of the evil Dark Ones. Helping save the Commander-in-Chief of the Legion John, she showed herself to be a potentially dangerous weapon susceptible to darkness in her own blood. Now, for the common good, Jonah has angels watching her...
Is Lily Bart a victim of circumstance or an agent of her own destruction? Edith Wharton’s acutely observed novel poses this question as it follows Lily’s tragic path through the country houses, card tables and drawing rooms of New York’s beau monde at the turn of the 20th century. Impoverished but well-born, Lily realizes a secure future depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. Her desire for a comfortable life means that she will not marry for love without money, but he...
This is Wharton’s fifth novel. It is considered, together with the previous „Ethan Frome „and the subsequent „The Custom of the Country”, as partly autobiographical. Young diplomat George Darrow is on his way to meet Anna Leath, an old girlfriend who is now a widow with a young daughter and a grown stepson. When Anna abruptly postpones their rendezvous without explanation, Darrow concludes that she is no longer interested in him. He has a brief liaison with the delicate, ge...
American writer Edith Wharton is known for her novels of manners set in old New York; yet much of her adult life was spent in France. She lived in Paris throughout World War I and was heavily involved in refugee work. She was a hugely successful writer and the first woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel „The Age of Innocence”. In this 1918 novella, we are introduced to the story of 15-year-old Troy Belknap who is from a wealthy family in New York but yearns to ...
Glennard had never thought himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness. The central character, Stephen Glennard, sells for publication the private letters of a former, deceased lover, who had become a famous writer, so that he can finance his marriage to the girl he loves. The letters are a success, and he is able to be married. But when the guilt becomes unbearable and he confesses his transgression to his new wife, will she be able to forgive...
Set in the 1920s, „Glimpses of the Moon” details the romantic misadventures of Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, a couple with the right connections but not much in the way of funds. They are in love and decide to marry, but realize their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted. Nick and Susy agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition. Their conditional marriage begins to falter a...
This is Edith Wharton’s earliest published collection of 8 short stories (1899). A selection consists: „Muse’s Tragedy”: Unrequited love between a poet and his muse. „The Journey”: A woman journeys with her ailing husband. „The Pelican”: A woman supports her son. „Souls Belated”: The pressure put on couples to marry. „A Coward”: A man recounts his cowardice past. „The Twilight of the God”: Past lovers meet under a husbands eye. „A Cup of Cold Water”: Redemption song. „The P...
Published in 1907, this little novel by the author of „The Age of Innocence” was considered controversial for its frank treatment of labor and industrial conditions, drug addiction, mercy killing, divorce, and second marriages. Clever, idealistic and poor John Amherst, the assistant manager of the cotton mill, is fed up with the deplorable working and living conditions of the workers in his charge. While visiting a worker in hospital he encounters a young nurse, Justine, co...
„The Descent of Man and Other Stories” is the third collection of ten short fiction from Edith Wharton, first published in 1904. It includes the title piece „Descent of Man,” as well as „The Other Two,” „Expiation,” „The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” „The Mission of Jane,” „The Reckoning,” „The Letter,” „The Dilettante,” „The Quicksand,” and „A Venetian Night’s Entertainment”. Wharton dissecting some of the customs, habits and vagaries of courtship and marriage, particularly as prac...
Kate Orme is a young woman whose illusions of marital bliss are shattered when she comes face to face with the dark secret harbored by her fiancé, the wealthy and deceptively ebullient Denis. Kate decides to go ahead and by society’s willingness to overlook such transgressions, nevertheless marries him. Years later, her son faces a moral crisis similar to the one that showed her his father’s moral weakness. With the precision, beauty, and sharp awareness of the cracks in up...
In 1921, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, earning the award for „The Age of Innocence”. But Wharton also wrote several other novels, as well as poems and short stories that made her not only famous but popular among her contemporaries. „Tales of Men and Ghosts” (1910) consists of ten masterful ghost stories that listed here in chronological order of their original publication dates: „The Bolted Door”, „His Father’s Son”, „The Daunt Diana”, „The ...
Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel is a devastating critique of American upward mobility, told through the journey of Undine Spragg from fictional Midwestern Apex City to New York to Paris. Undine Spragg is one of the most ruthless characters in all of literature, as selfishly unscrupulous as she is fiercely beautiful. As Undine climbs the social ladder through a series of marriages and affairs, she shows little concern for who she has to step on to get anything and everything she ...
Another thrilling mystery by author Carolyn Wells. Instead of prison time, former governor, Samuel Appleby, sentences his former rival, Daniel Wheeler to imprisonment on his homestead with a very strange addendum. He then endeavors to convince Mr. Wheeler to endorse his son’s candidacy for governor with a promise of commuting his sentence. In the meantime, Samuel Appleby is murdered in Wheeler’s study, with a bullet through his heart. With not enough clues to proceed in the...
Considered by some to be her finest work, Edith Wharton’s „Summer” created a sensation when first published in 1917, as it was one of the first novels to deal honestly with a young woman’s sexual awakening. Seventeen-year-old Charity Royall is desperate to escape life with her hard-drinking adoptive father. Their isolated village stifles her, and his behavior increasingly disturbs her. When a young city architect Lucius Harney visits for the summer, it offers Charity the ch...
Even a short novel like „Madame de Treymes” shows you what a masterful writer Edith Wharton was. It is a captivating portrait of turn-of-the-century American and French culture. Inspired by Wharton’s own entré into Parisian society in 1906 and reminiscent of the works of Henry James, it tells the story of two young innocents abroad: Fanny Frisbee of New York, unhappily married to the dissolute Marquis de Malrive, and John Durham, her childhood friend who arrives in Paris in...
One of Edith Wharton’s most famous novels – the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize – exquisitely details a tragic struggle between love and responsibility during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people „dreaded scandal more than disease”. Newland Archer, a restrained young attorney, is engaged to the lovely May Welland but falls in love with May’s beautiful and unconventional cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska who returns to New York after a...
Carolyn Wells inspires and entertains with her classical mystery masterpiece, „The Vanishing of Betty Varian”, guaranteed to feed the mystery monster that craves suspense! The book was first published in 1922. In this classic locked room mystery, the Varian family have rented a house for the summer – a house built on the edge of a cliff, three sides faced by water and the entrance the only way in. They are about to go on a picnic with family and friends when the daughter re...
It had seemed an idyllic way for a group of wealthy New Yorkers to spend a summer month, researching the supernatural in a reputed haunted mansion in the depths of Vermont’s Green Mountains. That is until two of their number are mysteriously struck down at afternoon tea. Could the supernatural be at the heart of these deaths? Or did humans do the deed. This is the riddle that the famed detective Pennington Wise must unravel as they tries to discover what happened in... The ...
Originally published in 1916, but actually written in 1890, „Bunner Sisters” is a compelling, heartbreaking little novella about two sisters, who have never been apart, struggling to eek an existence as small shopkeepers on the margins of late nineteenth-century society in New York. They barely make enough money to live on. But when Ann Eliza the elder buys Evelina the younger a clock that does not work for her birthday, the sisters commence a relationship with Herbert Ramy...
Fleming Stone №23. On the eve of her marriage to Rodney Sayre, Emily Duane disappears. She had left her Hillside Park home to visit the hospital but never arrived there. Foul play is feared when Jim Pennington reports his wife Pauline, Emily’s best friend, also missing. Pennington says he left his wife at the ravine a short distance from Emily’s home. When he returned she had vanished. Polly’s body is found in the ravine, but where’s Emily? A wonderful mystery abound with t...
Carolyn Wells (June 18, 1862 – March 26, 1942) was an American author and poet. Wells wrote a total of more than 170 books. She was a well known author of children’s stories, until she began reading mystery stories written by Anna Katherine Green, and from then on she devoted her writings to puzzling mysteries in a similar vein. A new book by this popular author, and written in her best and most interest-compelling style. Ladybird Lovell, the staying guest, is a quaint and ...
In the early years of the 20th century, life on a farm in Massachusetts is not easy. The New England winters are hard; snow and ice cover the fields for months, and the nights are long and cold. For a poor farmer like Ethan Frome, life has few bright moments. He works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena’s young and beautiful cousin Mattie Silver enters their househo...
Originally published in 1901, „Crucial Instances” is the second collection of six short stories connected, as the title suggests, by a hinging moment in the narrative through which the plot alters dramatically. The contents included the following: „The Duchess at Prayer”, „The Angel at the Grave”, „The Recovery”, „Copy: A Dialogue”, „The Rembrandt”, „The Moving Finger” and „The Confessional”.This is a great collection of stories, where Edith Wharton shows her wide range of ...
