Who Is Edith Wharton's Legacy?

In this section we are presenting the people who deeply inspired Edith Wharton in her future literary works. Not only she was influenced by great authors at that time, but she left an enormous legacy as well to new talents. What is more, her most important works have been brought to the big screen, some of them nearly a century later.

Since she was just a child, Edith was fascinated by literature. In accordance with the customs of her class, her parents opposed to the idea of their daughter reading books, until 'the day of her marriage'. However, the books in her father's huge library became her passion and she devoured them eagerly. She was very intelligent and could read English and French literature. Her favourite writers were Jonathan

Without going any further, Sophie McManus and Stephanie Clifford’s books are the most recent examples. A new generation of young writers who consider Wharton as a figure to look up. In special, they were inspired by her brilliant use of language. Stephanie Clifford was born in Seattle where she grew up until she moved to Brooklyn where she actually lives. She is a Loeb-award winning journalist who works in ‘New York Times’ as a reporter. She gave birth to her first book called Everybody Rise and became the new bestseller in ‘New York Times’. It was such a big success that ‘Fox 2000 Studios’ applied for its movie rights. This prodigious student obtained her degree as ‘Magna Cum Laude’ in the prestigious University of

Her first book had been a work on interior decorating; and now in her novels she adopts the practice of inventorying the contents of American houses. She had an excellent taste for decoration. Hundreds of interior design books are published every year. But they all owe their existence to a pioneering guide that was all the rage in 1897: The Decoration of Houses, written by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr.

Wharton, at the time, was a 30-something Manhattan society matron with a keen interest in architecture and interior design, rather than the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist she would become. Codman was a blue-blooded architect, one year her junior, with whom Wharton and her husband were remodeling a summer place in Newport, Rhode Island. Poor taste and vulgarity of all kinds reigned in that New England resort town, thanks to an influx of Vanderbilts and other newly moneyed clans anxious to put their lucre to conspicuous use, so much so that Wharton and Codman decided to write a book about how to build and decorate houses with nobility, grace, and