From an article on an "Edible Book Festival" (Albany, N. Y.):

William S. Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' brings an afternoon fare to mind. And works from John Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath,' and W. Somerset Maugham 'Cake and Ale,' to Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass,' and Edith Wharton's 'Fruit of the Tree' are enjoyable anytime, day or night. From bitter fruit to sweet sauce, the possibilities are endless.

From the Montreal Gazette:
"It's hard to think of that term as being anything other than derogatory," she [Tana Janowitz] replied over the phone from Brooklyn. "Because they certainly didn't call men's writing 'Boy Books.' Chick Lit usually means the book is written in the first person of a girl looking for a man - with a lot of punchy one-liners."

That's the contemporary take. "But if you're thinking of women's writing of the 20th century," she continued, "women's books going back to Edith Wharton certainly do have much more to do with the pursuit of love and happiness as opposed to men's books of the 20th century. They are different. I suppose Olivia Manning was one of the few writers in a war zone, dealing to a degree with politics. And that was supposed to be the realm of male writers, like Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh."

From the New York Times:
In Edith Wharton's circle, a lady who worked as a dressmaker was no lady. When Lily Bart, the ill-starred adventuress of "The House of Mirth," was finally reduced to working as a milliner, her exile from society was all but complete. That, of course, was before Mlle. Chanel changed the meaning of the term "designing woman" and established that black and white works better as a design statement than as a way of judging others.

From SFGate.com
Of course, Paul Bowles was attracted to Fez. So was Edith Wharton. And so continue to be hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the Moroccan city that's famous for its 1,000-year-old medina (the non-European part of a north African city).

From the Washington Post

Win One for the Flipper

By Marjorie Williams
Sunday, March 7, 2004; Page B07


I've been trying, really I have. As a charter member of the ABB Society -- Anybody But Bush -- I've tried not to fret over the alarmingly tautological nature of John Kerry's victory. He was inevitable because voters picked him to win because he had won over earlier voters and therefore must be a winner. I've tried not to worry over the fact that he has all the social bonhomie of one of Edith Wharton's ambivalent society stiffs. We know that some crucial part of the presidential electorate votes on impressions of likability, but I've assured myself that between now and November Kerry will warm up.

--Submitted by Abby Werlock

From Hermione Lee's review of The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (in The Guardian):
In "A Flying Start", one of Gallant's American ladies in Paris holds court in a sombre dining room overshadowed by a tree "grown from a sapling presented by Edith Wharton". In her youth she "had been allowed to peer round the door and watch her renowned compatriot eating sole meunière. She had not been presented to Mrs Wharton, who was divorced." This little tribute is apt as well as funny: Gallant has something of Wharton's fine, cool eye for social shifts and conflicts. And like Wharton she is a refugee from a culture she couldn't wait to get away from, but often returns to in her work.

From PLAYBILL:
Boston's Huntington Theatre Company will present its first Breaking Ground Festival, March 18-21, which will feature readings of four new play commissions — including a new Stephen Belber (Match, Tape) work — and a new musical based on the Edith Wharton novel "House of Mirth." . . .
The Festival continues March 21 at 3 PM with a reading of the new American musical Lily by Brooks Ashmanskas (music and lyrics) and Peter Flynn (book). The new adaptation, based on Edith Wharton's classic novel "House of Mirth," centers on the title character's rise and fall among high society in New York at the beginning of the 20th century.

From Ellen Goodman's column: Remember spinsters? Remember old maids? A century ago, a woman who didn't get married ended up like Edith Wharton's Lily Bart, broke and downing laudanum. When Susan B. Anthony turned 50, the headline in the New York Sun even called the mother of us all a "Brave Old Maid."

From the Boston Globe:

The Breaking Ground Festival, which runs from March 18 through 21, will feature readings of works in progress by writers commissioned through the Huntington playwriting fellowship program, along with a reading of a new musical, "Lily," based on Edith Wharton's novel "The House of Mirth." http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/02/19/huntington_fest_gives_a_read_on_new_plays/

Review of a local production of Ethan Frome from The Hawk Eye.

From The Guardian:
"So what does make us happy? Edith Wharton apparently said that happiness is the sublime moment when you get out of your corsets. Having burnt my bra in the Seventies on my mother's instructions I can't say I know how that feels. But I know what she means."

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

THE BANANA AND ITS PUBLIC: A century ago, the banana was still a relative novelty in the United States. In certain people's eyes, it even carried an aura of vulgarity. In the summer of 1904, Edith Wharton wrote to a friend about an unhappy stay at a new hotel: "Such dreariness, such whining callow women. ... What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without a sense of beauty and eating bananas for breakfast."

Wharton's aesthetic scruples notwithstanding, the banana was cheaper, higher in calories, and easier to store than most of its rival fruits. As international shipping expanded, bananas soon became popular among Americans of all classes. In 1940, more than 52 million bunches were imported. And as the industry grew, it disrupted and transformed the economies, cultures, and political structures of the banana-exporting countries of Latin America. The new anthology Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas (Duke University Press) sheds light on the complexities of the industry's social and economic history, deconstructing the already familiar images of the muscular United Fruit Company and its "banana republics" and moving beyond them.

From the Washington Post:
Torque n. the film that features a villain named Henry James, conjuring the tantalizing image of Edith Wharton riding shotgun wearing a "Fear This" tattoo and a Ramones T-shirt.

From the International Herald Tribune:
Marcel Proust, "Proust of the Ritz," as he was called, dined there often with the "gratin," or upper crust, eyed the pageboys and gossiped intently with the ambiguous Olivier. Edith Wharton, on the other hand, detested the place. Paris ladies, said one of her acquaintances, could be divided into two groups: "Ritz and anti-Ritz. The anti-Ritz class contains only Mrs. Edith Wharton."
http://www.iht.com/articles/125182.html

"Also today, Judith Anderson and Helen Menken star in the opening night of The Old Maid, Zoe Akins' adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel about two sisters in love with the same man during the Civil War. It wins the Pulitzer Prize for drama and runs 305 performances at the Empire Theatre."From the PLAYBILL site's "Today in Theater History" for January 7: "1935

This year's MLA meeting (27-30 December) marks the 20th anniversary of the Edith Wharton Society.

From the BERKSHIRE HERALD, December 23, 2003:

Dr. Hale, the town’s one doctor, would come to people’s houses day or night, she said. He drove a horse and wagon, and later a car, but always walked to nearer calls. He had a raccoon coat and galoshes that he always wore unbuckled. In “Ethan Frome,” Edith Wharton mentions a young doctor, Ed Hale, who married the judge’s daughter, Annie Walker — as the real Dr. Hale had, Peters said.
http://www.iberkshires.com/story.php?story_id=13071

From the WALL STREET JOURNAL:
"RHINEBECK, N.Y. (Oct. 8, 2003) -- It was the original McMansion, a home so grand that many believe it inspired the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses." Now it's for sale, and it may well be torn down.

So imposing was Wyndclyffe, built in 1853 by Edith Wharton's aunt, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, that it was the beginning of a craze for building ever-more-elaborate houses along the Hudson River. The Jones house had a four-story tower, intricate brickwork, 24 rooms, 80 acres of lawn and woodland and sweeping river views. Nearby estate owners soon were adding turrets, towers and extra wings." More at
http://homes.wsj.com/columnists/preservation/20031008-silverman.html
Submitted by Julie Olin-Ammentorp

"Summer, the Richard Rodgers Development Award-winning musical based on the steamy Edith Wharton novel, gets a Manhattan reading under the direction of Leonard Foglia Dec. 11." From the Playbill site. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/83208.html

The new book A IS FOR ABIGAIL, "an almanac of amazing American
women" by Lynne Cheney (Simon & Schuster 2003) features Edith Wharton on the "W" page.

Submitted by Julie Olin-Ammentorp