Thursday, November 29 at 5:30 PM

Richard Guy Wilson

Professor's Chair in Architectural History at the University of Virginia

will read from his new book

 Edith Wharton at Home:  Life at The Mount 

Edith Wharton is best known as a novelist but her first book, The Decoration of Houses, is arguably the most important American text on interior decoration.  Dr. Wilson examines Wharton's interest in design and its impact on her fiction. The Mount, Edith Wharton's country place in the Berkshires, is truly an autobiographical house.  There Wharton wrote some of her best-known novels, including Ethan Frome and House of Mirth.  The house itself, completed in 1902, embodies principles set forth in Wharton's book The Decoration of Houses, and the surrounding landscape displays her deep knowledge of Italian gardens.  Wharton, the renowned chronicler of the Gilded Age, stands at the pinnacle of turn of the twentieth-century American literature and social history.  The Mount was crucial to her success, and the story of her life there is filled with gatherings of literary figures and artists.  Edith Wharton at Home presents Wharton's life at The Mount in vivid detail with authoritative text by Dr.Wilson, and archival images, as well as new color photography of the restoration of The Mount and its spectacular gardens. 

Reviews: 

Not until reading the handsome new book Edith Wharton at Home:  Life at the Mount  do I understand how intertwined {Wharton's} writing was with her sense of place.  The book does a masterful job of showing how from 1902 until 1911 Wharton lived, wrote, and entertained a sparkling roster of visitors at The Mount.

-Traditional Home

 Richard Guy Wilson's Edith Wharton at Home...illuminates Wharton's life at her country house in the Berkshires--"my first real home," as Wharton called it, having built it to fit her design ideals.  The Mount was the place where she made her first forays into fiction (Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth) and was the salon of writers and artists.

-Vogue

 Author:

 Richard Guy Wilson holds the Commonwealth Professor's Chair in Architectural History at the University of Virginia.  His specialty is the architecture, design and art of the 18th to the 20th century both in America and abroad.  He was a visiting fellow at Cambridge University (England) in 2007.  He has received a number of academic honors, among them a Guggenheim fellow, prizes for distinguished writing, and in 1986 he was made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects.  He received the outstanding professor award at the University of Virginia in 2001.

  For further information contact:  Mitzi Ware, mitziware@hotmail.com