At her death in 1937, Wharton left behind a collection of unpublished work written throughout her lifetime. This book includes a novella penned when Wharton was only 14, two abandoned novels, three stage-plays, and a frank life writings drafted late in her career.

During her lifetime, Edith Wharton was America's most popular and prolific writer. This book presents the unpublished writings of a canonical author, along with three stage-plays that open up a different field of Wharton studies. It also includes a general introduction, volume introductions, textual variants, headnotes and endnotes.

Based on extensive new archival research, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction offers the first study of Wharton’s full engagement with original writing in genres outside those with which she has been most closely identified. So much more than an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Wharton is reconsidered in this book as a controversial playwright, a gifted poet, a trailblazing travel writer, an innovative and subversive critic, a hugely influential design writer, and an author who overturned the conventions of autobiographical form. Her versatility across genres did not represent brief sidesteps, temporary diversions from what has long been read as her primary role as novelist. Each was pursued fully and whole-heartedly, speaking to Wharton’s very sense of herself as an artist and her connected vision of artistry and art. The stories of these other Edith Whartons, born through her extraordinary dexterity across a wide range of genres, and their impact on our understanding of her career, are the focus of this new study, revealing a bolder, more diverse, subversive and radical writer than has long been supposed.