8 - The Fruit of the Tree

Summary

Edith Wharton's third novel, The Fruit of the Tree (1907), was written toward the end of her residence in New York, while she was yet summering at The Mount in Massachusetts. Her publisher Charles Scribner wanted another best seller just like The House of Mirth (1905), that is, a fresh popular exposé of the moral bankruptcy of New York high society. But she was determined not to be typed as a high-society novelist, and she wanted nothing more than to illustrate her capacity for thematic variety. The conflict between capital and labor seemed promising.

Promising - but strange for Mrs. Wharton. Blake Nevius once suggested that Mrs. Wharton “had no community whatsoever” with “Howells and his generation,” but in fact she knew Howells as a friend and must almost certainly have thought about The Fruit of the Tree in terms of Annie Kilburn (1889) and other popular realist novels dealing with industrial problems in the New England factory town. Howells's generation had produced a long line of popular labor novels, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (1871), Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Stillwater Tragedy (1880), John Hay's The Breadwinners (1883), and H. F. Keenan's The Money-Makers (1885).