Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American writer whose best-known works are The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which Edith won the Pulitzer Prize, becoming the first woman ever to do so. As well as writing novels, she wrote over eighty short stories and published the celebrated collections of uncanny stories Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910), Xingu and Other Stories (1916) and her collection of personal favourites, Ghosts (1937).