Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of January 24th.
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It is the 24th day of the year, leaving 341 days remaining in 2022.
Wharton was raised in wealth and privilege, but with all the strictures placed on women of her age and status. Except for her writing -- and the basic fact that she did write and publish her work -- Wharton rarely lived outside her predetermined station in live.
And her books mirrored her life. She wrote of the wealthy of the Gilded Age in the late 19th Century, and the pain of the restrictions of the choices it forced on people, particularly in their personal lives.
She was a natural reader and story teller -- at a young age she would walk around with a book of empty pages and pretend to read as she created her own stories. But while she was a voracious reader all her life, her mother forbade her to read a novel until she turned a certain age, a restriction she adhered to.
Indeed, Wharton did not write and publish her first novel, The Valley of Decision, until she was 40. But once she started, she wrote prodigiouly, penning 10 movels over the next 11 years, and 15 in all. Her second novel, The House of Mirth, gained her fame and critical acclaim. In that novel, she authored a recreated version of the rigid society she lived in, and analyzed its reactions to social change.
In 1920, she wrote The Age of Innocence, for which she won the Pulitzer price for literature. She was the first woman so honored. In the novel, Wharton, then 58 and in the aftermath of World War I, looked back on the years of her childhood and wrote somewhat sympathetically about the Gilded Age.
By then, she was living most of her time in France, where she died in 1937.
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