The Valley of Decision by Pulitzer Prize Author Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

Overview

This two-volume romance chronicles the rise to power of Odo Valsecca during the intellectual and political tumult which preceded the French Revolution. During his childhood and early manhood, Odo comes in close contact with all the major factions—the peasantry, the clergy, the liberal freethinkers, and the nobility—which have a vital stake in maintaining or subverting the antiquated power structure based on rigid class distinctions and superstitious religious traditions. How Odo’s actions and ideals are shaped by these forces and the traditions.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013361713
Publisher:	Granto Classic Books
Publication date:	09/28/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	471 KB

About the Author

Wharton was born to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander in New York City. She had two brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. The saying "Keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to her father's family.[1] She shared a lifelong friendship with her Rhinelander niece, landscape architect Beatrix Farrand of Reef Point in Bar Harbor, Maine, and often traveled with Henry James in Europe. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1885, at 23 years of age, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years her senior. From a well-established Boston family, he was a sportsman and a gentleman of her social class and shared her love of travel, although they had little in common intellectually.[citation needed] From the late 1880s until 1902, he suffered acute depression, and the couple ceased their extensive travel.[2] At that time his depression manifested as a more serious disorder, after which they lived almost exclusively at The Mount, their estate designed by Edith Wharton. In 1908 her husband's mental state was determined to be incurable and she divorced him in 1913.[2] Around the same time, Edith was overcome with the harsh criticisms levied by the naturalist writers. Later in 1908 she began an affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist for The Times, in whom she found an intellectual partner.

Date of Birth:

January 24, 1862

Date of Death:

August 11, 1937

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France

Education:

Educated privately in New York and Europe