During the spring of 2007, Caroline Field Levander lectured on four novels by Edith Wharton. In the fall 2007 semester Professor Levander will discuss four more of Wharton’s works.

Edith Wharton, arguably the most important early 20th-century American woman of letters, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, received an honorary doctorate of letters from Yale University, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her most famous novels continue to receive widespread attention and have become box office hits. This series of four lectures will move beyond the familiar Wharton to study her life and career as revealed in lesser-known works. The first two classes will look at The Reef (1912) and The Custom of the Country (1913), respectively. We then will turn to her collection of ghost stories. Our final session will be devoted to her late and unfinished novel, The Buccaneers (1938).

Caroline Field Levander is a professor of English and director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She is the author, most recently, of Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois (2006).

The books for this course will be available at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet. The collection of ghost stories is the Scribner Library edition.

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