Edith Newbold Jones Wharton (1861 or 1862-1937) was born into an elite New York City family that spent a lot of time in Europe to save money. She married Boston banker Edward Wharton in 1885. She was best known as a novelist; her major works, detailing the rigid and unforgiving nature of the society in which she had grown up, were House of Mirth (1905), and The Age of Innocence (1921), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote one of the earliest travel books about an automobile journey, A Motor Flight Through France (1908), and worked tirelessly in France during World War I, supporting the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps.