Editing Edith Wharton (section)

===Influences===
American children's stories containing slang were forbidden in Wharton's childhood home.{{sfn|Lee|2008|p=31}} This included such popular authors as [[Mark Twain]], [[Bret Harte]], and [[Joel Chandler Harris]]. She was allowed to read [[Louisa May Alcott]] but Wharton preferred [[Lewis Carroll]]'s ''[[Alice's Adventures in Wonderland]]'' and [[Charles Kingsley]]'s ''[[The Water-Babies]], A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby''.{{sfn|Lee|2008|p=31}} Wharton's mother forbade her from reading many novels and Wharton said she "read everything else but novels until the day of my marriage."{{sfn|Lee|2008|p=31}} Instead Wharton read the classics, philosophy, history, and poetry in her father's library including [[Daniel Defoe]], [[John Milton]], [[Thomas Carlyle]], [[Alphonse de Lamartine]], [[Victor Hugo]], [[Jean Racine]], [[Thomas Moore]], [[Lord Byron]], [[William Wordsworth]], [[John Ruskin]], and [[Washington Irving]].{{sfn|Lee|2008|pp=31–34}} Biographer Hermione Lee describes Wharton as having read herself "out of Old New York" and her influences included [[Herbert Spencer]], [[Charles Darwin]], [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], [[Thomas Henry Huxley|T. H. Huxley]], [[George Romanes]], [[James George Frazer|James Frazer]], and [[Thorstein Veblen]].{{sfn|Lee|2008|p=23}} These influenced her [[Ethnography|ethnographic]] style of [[novelization]].{{sfn|Lee|2008|p=23}} Wharton developed a passion for [[Walt Whitman]].{{sfn|Lee|2008|p=32}}