The close friendship between Edith Wharton (Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, and The Buccaneers) and Louis Bromfield (Early Autumn, The Farm, and The Rains Came) evolved toward the end of Wharton's long and distinguished life and during the height of Bromfield's career. Despite the disparity in their ages and backgrounds-he was thirty-four years her junior and a Jeffersonian democrat from the Midwest, she an aristocratic Old New Yorker with a penchant for Hamiltonian economics-the bond between them, described by Bromfield was "a close bond, as close in many senses as I have ever known."...