The Loss of a Friend

Edith Wharton was a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt's second wife, Edith. Roosevelt was familiar enough with Wharton's novels to send her written suggestions from time to time, and the two often exchanged letters. Immediately after his death, she penned this eulogy to him as a "great American," completing it on January 7, 1919. In 1920 she published The Age of Innocence, which won her the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a woman. The Roosevelt tribute appeared in her 1926 volume, Twelve Poems.