Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prizewinning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insiders view of Americas 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 eras other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt.

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander at their brownstone atWest Twentythird Street in New York City. She had two much older brothers, Frederic Rhinelander, who was sixteen, and Henry Edward, who was eleven. She was baptized April 20, 1862, Easter Sunday, at Grace Church. To her friends and family she was known as Pussy Jones. The saying keeping up with the Joneses is said to refer to her fathers family. She was also related to the Rensselaer family, the most prestigious of the old patroon families. She had a lifelong lovely friendship with her Rhinelander niece, landscape architect Beatrix Farrand of Reef Point in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Source: Wikipedia