Edith Wharton, née Edith Newbold Jones, (born January 24, 1862, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 11, 1937, Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, near Paris, France), American author best known for her stories and novels about the upper-class society into which she was born.

Edith Jones came of a distinguished and long-established New York family. She was educated by private tutors and governesses at home and in Europe, where the family resided for six years after the American Civil War, and she read voraciously. She made her debut in society in 1879 and married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Boston banker, in 1885.

Although she had had a book of her own poems privately printed when she was 16, it was not until after several years of married life that Wharton began to write in earnest. Her major literary model was Henry James, whom she knew, and her work reveals James’s concern for artistic form and ethical issues. She contributed a few poems and stories to Harper’s, Scribner’s, and other magazines in the 1890s, and in 1897, after overseeing the remodeling of a house in Newport, Rhode Island, she collaborated with the architect Ogden Codman, Jr., on The Decoration of Houses. Her next books, The Greater Inclination (1899) and Crucial Instances (1901), were collections of stories.

This collection contain the following:

I.   Introduction
II.   Crucial Instances
III.   The Descent of Man and other stories
IV.   The Hermit and the Wild Woman and other stories
V.   Tales of Men and Ghosts
VI.   Xingu
VII.   The Choice
VIII.   Coming Home
IX.   The Triumph of Night
X.   Kerfol
XI.   Autres Temps . . .
XII.   The Long Run
XIII.   Here and Beyond
XIV.   Certain People
XV.   A Backward Glance
XVI.   False Dawn
XVII.   The Old Maid
XVIII.   The Spark
XIX.   New Year’s Day
XX.   The Mother's Recompense
XXI.   Twilight Sleep
XXII.   The Children
XXIII.   Hudson River Bracketed
XXIV.   The Gods Arrive
XXV.   The Touchstone
XXVI.   The Valley of Decision
XXVII.   Sanctuary
XXVIII.   The House of Mirth
XXIX.   Madame de Treymes
XXX.   Fruit of the Tree
XXXI.   Ethan Frome
XXXII.   The Reef
XXXIII.   The Custom of the Country
XXXIV.   Bunner Sisters
XXXV.   Summer
XXXVI.   The Age of Innocence
XXXVII.   The Glimpses of the Moon