Emma Wolf's Short Stories in The Smart Set (AMS Studies in Modern Literature)

Edited and with an introduction by Barbara Cantalupo, Emma Wolf's Short Stories in "The Smart Set" gathers together, for the first time, the ten stories that Jewish-American author Emma Wolf (1865-1932) published in "The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness". Wolf was already a well-published novelist by the time she began contributing to Smart Set in 1902. For the next nine years, even as the magazine underwent a series of significant editorial shifts, Wolf continued providing stories that satisfied her editors' desire for cleverly turned stories, while also expressing her beliefs about the power of love and the importance of family. Not conforming to the commonly held paradigm that early twentieth-century Jewish-American women authors wrote about poverty, politics, and class struggle, Wolf's writing, like James' and Wharton's, addresses the intimate concerns of the upper-middle class, as this collection reveals. Wolf's characters, all products of the Gilded Age, engaged social complexities familiar to Smart Set readers: the impact of easier divorce, new roles for the 'New Woman', and the politics of big money.