Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American writer and designer best known for her stories featuring an insider’s view of America’s wealthy and privileged class. She was born Edith Newbold Jones into an upper crust family (the Joneses of the phrase “keeping up with Joneses”) and was raised in the thick of New York society. In 1885 she married well-bred Bostonian Edward Wharton. They traveled widely and eventually settled in 1902 at the Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. Edward suffered from an increasingly acute depression, deemed incurable in 1908, and they divorced in 1913, subjecting her to the opprobrium of her peers. She moved to France shortly thereafter, dividing her time between Paris and a villa in Provence, returning to America only once in 1923, to accept an honorary degree from Yale University. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for The Age of Innocence, the first woman to do so, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1927, 1928, and 1930.