- Published: 1 June 2000
- ISBN: 9781101219522
- Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 192
Ethan Frome
The new paperback series: Penguin English Library
A masterwork of American literature from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Age of Innocence.
A marked departure from Edith Wharton’s usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she belonged, Ethan Frome is a sharply etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife’s young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by that which offers him the greatest chance at happiness.
Like The House of Mirth and many of Edith Wharton’s other novels, Ethan Frome centers on the power of local convention to smother the growth of the individual. Written with stark simplicity, this powerful and tragic novel has long been considered one of Wharton’s greatest works.
- Published: 1 June 2000
- ISBN: 9781101219522
- Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 192
Other books in the series
About the author
Edith Wharton was born into a wealthy New York family in 1862, during the American Civil War. She married at twenty-three, and subsequently divided her time between homes in New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The House of Mirth, perhaps her most famous work, appeared in 1905, and was followed by Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer and The Age of Innocence. Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She died in 1937.