Edith Wharton

Born Edith Newbold Jones into a family so prominent the phrase 'keeping up with the Joneses' is sometimes traced to them, she endured a marriage to a mentally unstable husband for nearly three decades before divorcing him in 1913, by then long settled in France. She had designed and built The Mount, her Massachusetts estate, years before the marriage finally collapsed.

When the First World War broke out she stayed in Paris, organizing workrooms for unemployed seamstresses and shelters for refugee children, work that earned her France's Legion of Honor. She wrote The Age of Innocence, the novel that made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, partly in the shadow of that wartime devastation, mourning a vanished world of manners on two continents at once.

Yale awarded her its first honorary doctorate ever given to a woman, in 1923.