Edith Jones Wharton (1862-1937), one of America’s most important authors, lived at 14 West 23rd Street, Manhattan at a time when 23rd Street marked the northern boundary of fashionable New York. There, in her father’s extensive library, young Edith Jones discovered the world of literature. Wharton wrote with authority on gardens and design, but was most celebrated for her fiction. Her novels and stories are characterized by her intelligence, perception and the great beauty of her prose. Wharton lived in France for the latter part of her life, but the complex world of patrician New York remained the source of her greatest fiction. This includes The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which, in 1921 she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.