The Book Page -- October 2, 2023

Locator: 45629WHARTON.  

Wow, wow, just delivered. "Free delivery" and the books were "free," also. What a great country.

I've had to dispose of much of my library -- I simply ran out of shelves -- but now that I have a few empty shelves, I am re-building my library, as it were. I feel like the proverbial kid in a candy store.

I'm in my Edith Wharton phase, having just finished Hermione Lee's biography. My notes are here.

This is the Norton Critical Edition, c. 2003. Whenever possible, I tend to read the Norton Critical Editions first -- the introductions and the essays that generally make up half of the entire edition are incredible. I guess that's the real reason I buy the Norton books.

It's hard to believe but The Age of Innocence is set in 1875 -- only ten years after the end of the Civil War. Edith was born in 1862, in NYC, during the Civil war. She was brought to Europe by her parents when she was four years old, or thereabouts, and did not return to America until 1872, at the age of ten. She wrote Innocence during the years following the end of WWI where she was instrumental in helping refugees from the war, particularly those from Belgium. The book was published in 1920 and was written to capture how she remembers Old New York, the working title for the book. This book won her the Pulitzer Prize; Wharton was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize. She was nominated, but never won, the Nobel Prize for literature on three different occasions, first in 1920, if I recall correctly.

I am incredibly excited to see how Edith Wharton remembers "old New York," just a few years after the end of the US Civil War. 

Wharton was a generation (or more) than the great women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and before the great writers, male and female, of the 20th century, to include Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She met Scott Fitzgerald; I don't recall if she met Virginia Woolf. Edith died in 1937; Woolf committed suicide by drowning in 1941, unable to live through yet another European war.

On another note, for some reason -- and I've long forgotten what/why -- I had a renewed interest pterosaurs a few months ago. I did a fairly exhaustive search over at Amazon to see which might be the "best" book. Way too many to choose from. This is the one I selected. A reminder: pterosaurs are reptiles, not dinosaurs. Dinosaurs only lived on land: they did not fly and they did not return to the ocean.