Happy June, dear reader.  Yo rent is due.

I’m once again running behind on the production schedule for the two books I’m working on (one officially, the other not), so I’m going to keep things on the brief side today.

Today we pour some out for literary badass Edith Wharton.  The details and timeline of the final events of her life seem to vary greatly depending on which source one consults, but all accounts agree: on this day in 1937, Edith collapsed from a heart attack.  Some sources say this happened at her French country home, while others insist it happened at the home of Ogden Codman, a big-deal architect and designer.  She survived the heart attack, but she dropped dead two months later from a stroke, hitting her at Le Pavillon Colombe in Saint-Brice-sous-Foret, France, where she died at 5:30 p.m.  But that moment on June 1 marked the beginning of the end for a writer who wielded her words like a blade, carving out truths about wealth, class, and the human condition which still sting today.

Wharton didn’t dick around with pretty illusions. Books like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth aren’t polite little tea-party reads—they’re a liver-kick, peeling back the suffocating traditions and quiet savagery of a world obsessed with appearances. She wrote with a fierce, clear-eyed intensity that makes you feel the rot beneath the polish, the ache behind the opulence. In 1921, she became the first woman to snag a Pulitzer for The Age of Innocence, which winning was a fuck-you to anyone who thought a woman couldn’t cut to the bone of the human condition.

Her death was the end of an era for a writer who made us see the cracks in the American Dream, the ones we’re still tripping over today. Wharton’s legacy demands we face the mess of our own making, unblinking. So here’s to the literary titan who never flinched, whose words still burn with a clarity that’ll wake you up faster than a shot of Jack. Let us pour some out today for Auntie Edith.

N.P.: “Black Betty” – The Dead Daisies