The Long Run: Restored Classics to Go Edition

· Otbebookpublishing
Ebook
47
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

Returning to New York after twelve years abroad, the narrator unexpectedly encounters his old Harvard friend Halston Merrick at a Cumnor dinner party and is struck by the change in him: once brilliant, ambitious, and destined for public life, Merrick has instead been absorbed by the family iron business and never married. His attention is fixed on a quiet woman in gray, Mrs. Reardon, whom the narrator recognizes as Paulina Trant, a once-radiant figure now faded into conventional respectability. The sight of her, and Merrick's uneasy reaction, hints at a buried history of love and regret. At Riverdale, the narrator finds Merrick trying to write again, but his polished essays feel drained of vitality. Pressed gently, Merrick confesses that business and art have both become forms of surrender, and that he once rejected marriage and creativity out of fear of abandonment, losing both in a single act of self-protection. He then tells the story of his awakening to Paulina, a woman married to the dull, moralistic Philip Trant, whose brilliance, fairness, and independence made their bond feel both intellectually complete and dangerously real. When Philip plans to travel with her, the lovers are forced toward a crisis of separation, and Paulina's eventual arrival to claim not a stolen hour but a life of shared commitment turns their affair into a fierce test of passion, duty, and the price of choosing love without compromise. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.
Returning to New York after twelve years abroad, the narrator unexpectedly encounters his old Harvard friend Halston Merrick at a Cumnor dinner party and is struck by the change in him: once brilliant, ambitious, and destined for public life, Merrick has instead been absorbed by the family iron b...

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About the author

Edith Wharton was an American novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic whose life bridged the elegance of old New York society and the wider literary world of Europe. Born into privilege in 1862, she grew up among the customs and expectations of a rigid upper class, an experience that gave her a sharp eye for the social pressures, hidden desires, and moral compromises that shape private lives. Over the course of a remarkably productive career, she became one of the first women to win lasting critical respect in American literature, admired for her precise prose, psychological insight, and unsparing social observation. Her fiction often explores marriage, class, money, duty, and the cost of conformity, while also tracing the quiet rebellions of people who long for freedom, intimacy, and self-definition. These themes remain strikingly relevant today, especially in a world still shaped by status anxiety, gender expectations, and the tension between personal happiness and social approval. Wharton's legacy endures because she wrote with both elegance and moral clarity, exposing the rules that govern human behavior without losing sympathy for those trapped by them. Readers who enjoy sophisticated social fiction, subtle emotional tension, and beautifully controlled prose will find her work especially rewarding.

Edith Wharton was an American novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic whose life bridged the elegance of old New York society and the wider literary world of Europe. Born into privilege in 1862, she grew up among the customs and expectations of a rigid upper class, an experience that ga...

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