Edith Wharton and Rich People With Bad Taste

What Wharton's design treatise can tell us about Shivs and Kendalls of today.

If anyone knows rich people, it’s Edith Wharton. To start, she was one. Her father’s family (surname Jones) was said to be the “Joneses” you should be keeping up with. Second, pretty sure The Age of Innocence is the epitome of “write what you know.” And at age nine, Edith caught typhoid fever while on vacation with her family at a spa in the Black Fores…