I am a newcomer to the blogging world, but no stranger to writing. I am a university grad with a BA in English lit, and love jotting down my every thought on paper. I think that creating a blog will be a thoughtful, constructive outlet, far better than random notes in unorganized college-ruled notebooks. While I am dedicating this blog to the examination of and reflection on the life, work, and ideas of Edith Wharton, I will attempt to address, connect, and think about related and similar topics from my own perspective.

I have been told by a fellow blogger that there are not enough Wharton blogs like this out there, and I hope to shed some new and very meaningful “light” on her characters, her settings, her themes, her successes, her shortcomings as a writer, and how these things relate to “the real world.”

I love the enduring ‘spirit’ of American cities and regions, and their depictions in American literature, no matter how great or small. But I most find fascinating, as I have been discovering through my blog writing, with the help and emphases of the work of Edith Wharton, and writers who shared her keen, piercing urban insights, the shared ‘spirit’ of the cities of New York and Atlanta — ‘Empire Cities’ of the North and South, both equally, in haunting ways, distempered through time by some form of devastation, yet two ‘kindred cities’ who have both encountered the true meaning of what it is to ‘rise from the ashes’.

I look forward to sharing each blog!

John