The Touchstone

Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.‪ Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt.
A young man too destitute to propose marriage to his beloved finds a morally dubious means of making money by publishing the love letters another woman wrote to him in this deft, psychological portrait of how social status, money, and self-deception impact love.