From The New York Times:
She is neither a time traveler nor a superhero able to simultaneously inhabit several disparate corners of American literary history at once. Rather, Ms. Climent was showing off the large trompe-l’oeil mural she had painted for New York University’s Languages and Literature building at 19 University Place. The mural, “At Home With Their Books,” measures 10 feet high by 30 feet wide and depicts, in six chronologically ordered panels, the writing spaces of six authors who spent some, if not all, of their careers in New York. Ms. Climent said the university selected three of the authors and asked her to choose three, but stipulated that none could be living.
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Born into a wealthy New York family, Wharton spent a decade living in an estate known as the Mount in Lenox, Mass., that was extensively restored and for several years was open to the public as a sort of museum. “I was lucky that I got to go there and photograph it before it went broke and closed down,” Ms. Climent said. Pointing at the mural, she added: “Wharton wrote ‘The House of Mirth’ in that bedroom. But the fountain pen hadn’t been invented yet, so I put it on the shelf in front — because it came later in her career. I re-created her habit of throwing papers on the floor.”
More here.
