Edgar Saltus
4 books
- If you like your Gilded Age fiction cold-blooded, this delivers: a rich, unreadable husband, his young wife Maida, an old lover, and revenge served with terrifying politeness. Saltus writes in glittering little epigrams, and the ending is genuinely chilling, so don't expect comfort.
- Saltus writes like a cynic polishing every sentence to a shine, and here he takes Tristrem, a gentle, almost too decent idealist in gilded-age New York, and follows his selflessness to a genuinely dark end. Short, bitter, strange; skip it if you need a hero rewarded.