Hudson River Bracketed

Edith Wharton turned late in her career to the making of an artist, following Vance Weston, a raw and ambitious young man from the Midwest who arrives in the older, settled world of the East with dreams of becoming a writer. An aging cousin's house called The Willows, with its shelves of neglected books, opens a door onto a cultural past he never knew he lacked, while his feeling for the clever Halo Spear pulls against his early marriage to the gentle Laura Lou. Published in 1929, the novel traces how talent is formed by hunger, mentorship, and hard disappointment. Wharton's eye for social nuance and thwarted longing is as sharp here as in her famous New York books. This free PDF and EPUB edition presents the complete novel.