List No. 106

MY FAVORITE BOOKS

Edith Wharton

1909

Novelist Edith Wharton was born in 1862 in New York and stayed there until the turn of the century, plying her trade as a writer. It wasn’t until 1920, at which point she had settled in France, that she wrote The Age of Innocence, her 12th novel and the one that would see her awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – the first ever to be awarded to a woman. She was also nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature on three occasions. In 1909, she wrote a list of her favourite books.

My Favorite Books, 1909

Faust; Goethe

Shakespeare

Divina Commedia; Dante Alighieri

Seneca the Younger

Giacomo Leopardi, John Keats

Blaise Pascal: Pensées & Provinciales

Schopenhauer

Origin of Species; Charles Darwin

Walt Whitman; The Leaves of Grass

Nietzsche: Jenseits v. gut u Böse (Beyond Good and Evil); Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morality); Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power)

Lettres de Flaubert

Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann

Le Rouge et la noir; Stendhal

La Chartreuse de Parme; Stendhal

Mme Bovary; Gustave Flaubert

The Egoist; George Meredith

Anna Karenina; Leo Tolstoy

Harry Richmond; George Meredith

The Portrait of a Lady; Henry James

Adolphe; Benjamin Constant

Manon Lescaut; Abbé Prévost

Tyndall’s Essays