An insider's history of how famed novelist Wharton stirred up scandal in the western Massachusetts town.In 1900, Edith Wharton burst into the settled summer colony of Lenox. An aspiring novelist in her thirties, she was already a ferocious aesthete and intellect. She and her husband, Teddy, planned a defiantly classical villa, and she became a bestselling author with The House of Mirth in 1905. As a hostess, designer, gardener and writer, Wharton set high s...

An account of the famous American author's visit to a New England retreat. "Anyone who loves the Berkshires will love this book." —Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-winning authorWhat drew Nathaniel Hawthorne to a remote village deep in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts in 1850? Slip into the fascinating social scene he encountered in the drawing rooms and on the croquet lawns of Lenox's country retreats. Here, under the benevolent spell of the Sedgwick fam...