First published in 1911, <I>Ethan Frome</I> is widely regarded as Edith Wharton's most revealing novel and her finest achievement in fiction. Set in the bleak, barren winter landscape of New England, it is the tragic tale of a simple man, bound to the demands of his farm and his tyrannical, sickly wife, Zeena, and driven by his star-crossed love for Zeena's young cousin, Mattie Silver. "In its spare, chilling creation of rural isolation, hardscrabble poverty and wintry landscape," writes Alfred Kazin in his afterword, <I>"Ethan Frome</I> overwhelms the reader as a drama of irresistible necessity." An exemplary work of literary realism in setting and character, <I>Ethan Frome</I> stands as one of the great classics of twentieth-century American literature.