{"id":3040,"date":"2018-01-23T21:36:53","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T02:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=3040"},"modified":"2020-01-23T13:19:58","modified_gmt":"2020-01-23T18:19:58","slug":"waltzing-with-edith-wharton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/waltzing-with-edith-wharton\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday Edith Wharton! You Changed My Life!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not surprising that I fell in love with Edith Wharton, given that I grew up in Gilded Age New York. The building on upper Broadway in Manhattan that I was raised in was one of two massive apartment blocks built circa 1900 by Harry Mulliken.\u00a0 Like Mulliken\u2019s more elaborate Lucerne Hotel on 79th and Amsterdam, it had gorgeous tapestry brickwork and stone detailing,<\/p>\n

The public library I visited every week was a Venetian palazzo designed by McKim, Mead, and White. This was a temple of books, a sanctuary, and a doorway to another more elegant world.\u00a0 Perhaps most enthralling for me as a young boy was our family\u2019s regular bus route downtown that took us along Riverside Drive past one Gilded Age mansion, brownstone, and apartment building after another.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The past was all around me as it might not be in other parts of New York City, and so discovering Wharton in college was like claiming part of my own history.\u00a0 I bought every single book of hers then available in Scribner paperbacks and read them many times, awed by her wit, her powers of description, and her sharp eye for hypocrisy and foolishness.\u00a0 In the summer of 1975 I read R.W. B. Lewis\u2019s riveting Pulitzer-winning Wharton biography that helped launch the revival of her work, and through reading about Wharton\u2019s life I felt even more inspired to pursue my own career as a writer.<\/p>\n

That career of publishing twenty-five books in many genres has led me back to Wharton three times. In the early 90s I published a study of the emotion of shame in her writing and her life, something that had never been noticed or discussed before.\u00a0 A few years after\u00a0Edith Wharton\u2019s Prisoners of Shame<\/em>, I invented two fictional Wharton societies and pitted them against each other in an academic mystery, The Edith Wharton Murders<\/em>.\u00a0 It was my first book to be reviewed by the New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n

More recently, I\u2019ve re-entered her world in a far more intimate way: I\u2019ve radically re-visioned\u00a0The House of Mirth<\/em> from the point of view of Lily Bart\u2019s Jewish suitor Simon Rosedale.\u00a0 I’ve given Rosedale a home, a family, a history, dreams, and a tormented heart.\u00a0 In writing\u00a0Rosedale in Love<\/a><\/em>, I haven\u2019t tried to imitate Wharton\u2019s style, but I\u00a0have written the book in a period voice after two years of immersing myself in fiction and nonfiction from the early 1900s. I don\u2019t know how Wharton would have felt about my novel, but for me, it\u2019s been one of the most exhilarating collaborations of my career.<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael is the author of 2g5 books in genres from memoir to mystery.\u00a0 He teaches creative writing online at writewithoutborders.com.<\/a>
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It\u2019s not surprising that I fell in love with Edith Wharton, given that I grew up in Gilded Age New York. The building on upper Broadway in Manhattan that I was raised in was one of two massive apartment blocks built circa 1900 by Harry Mulliken.\u00a0 Like Mulliken\u2019s more elaborate Lucerne Hotel on 79th and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[5,95,249,321,1032,464,465,165,1034,1035,1031,1030,1033,1029,346,1027,1028,495],"class_list":["post-3040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edith-wharton","tag-books","tag-creative-writing-2","tag-edith-wharton","tag-fiction","tag-gilded-age-new-york","tag-historical-fiction","tag-historical-romance","tag-inspiration","tag-jewish-fiction","tag-jewish-historical-fiction","tag-r-w-b-lewis","tag-rosedale-in-love","tag-simon-rosedale","tag-the-age-of-innocence","tag-the-edith-wharton-murders","tag-the-gilded-age","tag-the-house-of-mirth","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3040"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5561,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040\/revisions\/5561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}