The Custom of the Country

Edith Wharton

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Edith Wharton's satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century appeared in 1913; it both appalled and fascinated its first reviewers, and established her as a major novelist. The Saturday Review wrote that she had 'assembled as many detestable people as it is possible to pack between the covers of a six-hundred page novel', but concluded that the book was 'brilliantly written', and 'should be read as a parable'. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the Midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary, and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father's money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. Wharton was re-creating an environment she knew intimately, and Undine's education for social success is chronicled in meticulous detail. The novel superbly captures the world of post-Civil War America, as ruthless in its social ambitions as in its business and politics.

Book Details

Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Publish Date: Aug 1st, 1997
Pages: 528
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 7.93in - 5.27in - 1.29in - 0.93lb
EAN: 9780684825885
Categories: • Classics• Literary

About the Author

Wharton, Edith: - Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist--the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921--as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York's elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

Praise for this book

Praise for Edith Wharton and Custom of the Country

"For my money, no literary antiheroine can best Undine... Wharton's portrait of [her] is so acute that it frequently flickers across time into the contemporary."--Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

"Prescient... In this new Gilded Age, when the disparities between rich and poor are again, and disastrously, as great as they were in Wharton's time, we could do with such a novelist, a cultural anthropologist who might hold up a mirror to our failings and our future, with eagle-eyed clarity and a small measure of compassion."--Claire Messud, The New York Times Style Magazine

"There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as 'major, ' and Edith Wharton is one."--Gore Vidal

"Wharton is an amusingly ruthless observer of the manners and mores of the wealthy."--Jay McInerney, The Week