American writer Edith Wharton published the novel, Ethan Frome in 1911. It takes place in the made-up Massachusetts town of Starkfield. The book was turned into a movie, Ethan Frome (1993). The book is a framed story. An unknown male narrator who is visiting the area for business spends winter in Starkfield in the frame story. Around the village, he notices a limping, silent man who nevertheless appeals to him with his bearing and behavior. This is Ethan Frome, a stalwart of the neighborhood who has lived here his entire life. As "the most stunning figure in Starkfield," "the ruin of a man," and with a "careless forceful gaze, in spite of a lameness checking each movement like the yank of a chain," Frome is characterized by the narrator. The narrator seeks to discover more about him out of curiosity. He learns that Frome's limp resulted from an injury sustained in a "smash-up" twenty-four years earlier, but further information is withheld. The narrator also learns little else from Frome's neighbors, aside from the fact that Ethan's attempt at higher education decades earlier was derailed by his father's sudden illness following an injury, which forced him to return to the farm to help his parents and never leave again.
Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, at 14 West 23rd St. into a prosperous New York family. The only daughter and third child of George Frederic and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, Edith spent a large portion of her early years in Europe, primarily in France, Germany, and Italy, where she honed her language skills and deepened her appreciation for the beauty of literature, art, and architecture. Although Wharton had a collection of her own poems privately printed when she was 16, she did not start writing seriously until after several years of marriage. The Valley of Decision, Wharton's debut book, was released in 1902. A novel of manners published in 1905, The House of Mirth, examined the stratified society in which the author was raised and its response to societal upheaval. She received a lot of positive reviews and attention for the book. She also became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. At age 75, she died at Pavillon Colombe on August 11, 1937. In Versailles' Cimetière des Gonards, she is buried next to her close friend Walter Berry.
