Ethan Frome (AmazonClassics Edition) - Softcover

In the dead gray cold of Starkfield, Massachusetts, farmer Ethan Frome is struggling to scrape out a living. His duties are to his wife, Zeena—an ungrateful, soul-sick hypochondriac as frigid as the New England winter. When Zeena’s cousin Mattie arrives to help with the farm, the ethereal, gentle-natured beauty brings a light and a fugitive affection into Ethan’s life. Yet for Ethan and Mattie, daring to be happy—and together—will have its consequences.

Exploring the costs of living life according to social mores, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is a masterwork of doomed love.

AmazonClassics brings you timeless works from the masters of storytelling. Ideal for anyone who wants to read a great work for the first time or rediscover an old favorite, these new editions open the door to literature’s most unforgettable characters and beloved worlds.

Revised edition: Previously published as Ethan Frome, this edition of Ethan Frome (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.

Born in New York City, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist, short story, and travel writer; a literary critic, poet, memoirist, and playwright; and a prolific Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and three-time nominee for the Nobel Prize.

Well educated and raised in wealth, Edith, whose love of writing came early, published her first poem at fifteen. It was a personal triumph for her, though less so for her family, who believed it unseemly for an upper-class girl’s name to appear in print. Such social restrictions that defined her youth would inform her ironic social satires and psychological portraits of America’s privileged class. Although she didn’t publish her first novel until she was forty, thereafter her prodigious output included such acclaimed works as The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence.