The notebooks and artwork of Holocaust victim Petr Ginz lay undiscovered in an old house in Prague for 60 years. In 2003, after the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, it came to light that Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon had carried with him a drawing ( Moon Landscape ) by young Petr an act intended to commemorate the Holocaust victims. Not long after a man came forward wishing to sell some old writings and drawings all by Petr Ginz.

Edited by Ginz’s sister, Chava Pressburger, The Diary of Petr Ginz, 1941-1942 is the record of a Jewish schoolboy’s daily life in Prague while it is under Nazi control. Fourteen-year-old Petr, an irrepressible prodigy who excelled in painting, drawing and writing, kept a straightforward, calm record of his days, including his schooling, family life, and the personal indignities and work (cleaning typewriters) forced upon him and his family by Hitler’s edicts. Embellished with his wry poetry and his stark, intense linocuts and drawings, the diary entries are short, many no more than a few sentences, but they reveal volumes about the Nazis’ draconian methods: Tuesday, March 3, 1942: In the afternoon in town. There are ordinances everywhere saying that it is not allowed to wash Jewish laundry. As the strictures placed upon the Jews became tighter, there was an escalation of transports, moving the Jewish populace to the ghetto of Thereisienstadt before transfer to Nazi death camps in occupied Poland. Petr’s diary ends in August 1942, two months before he was separated forever from his family and sent to Thereisienstadt, where he would live (and start a secret rebel newspaper), work and tirelessly study for two years. At the end of that time 16-year-old Petr was taken to Auschwitz and exterminated one of many lives prematurely ended, but a voice not fully stilled. Of Petr’s determination to bear witness, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer writes in the book’s introduction, Surrounded by death, and facing his own, Petr put words on paper. Given his unprecedented situation, his words were unprecedented. He was creating new language. He was creating life.

Edith Wharton is perhaps best known for translating social history into fiction as she did in two of her most widely read novels, The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, becoming the first woman to do so. Her most popular book, Ethan Frome, a departure for her, was published in 1911. Growing up in New York in a well-to-do family during the Gilded Age, Wharton was an avid reader of important nonfiction works and a close observer of the elegant life and dramatic social change of that era. Despite an unhappy marriage and a difficult relationship with her mother and brothers, Wharton created a distinctive and sometimes extravagant life for herself, mostly abroad.

That story unfolds in Hermione Lee’s magnificent new biography Edith Wharton. Lee, Oxford’s first female Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature and author of a highly acclaimed biography of Virginia Woolf, says Wharton was passionately interested in France, England, and Italy, but could never be done with the subject of America and Americans. In her richly detailed study, Lee shows how Wharton developed into an extremely ambitious author, publishing at least one book every year between 1897 and her death in 1937. Apart from her writing, Wharton was interested in fine homes and gardens, travel and friendships. Her circle of friends and acquaintances included Henry James, art critic Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark and Theodore Roosevelt.

Lee discusses what she calls the two essential underpinnings of [Wharton’s] life, money and servants. Of particular interest is Wharton’s work in establishing and supporting charities to assist in the war effort in France during World War I. Lee’s portrait also reveals some of Wharton’s less attractive characteristics, such as snobbery, racism, anti-Semitism and anti-feminism, which she says were commonplace among upper-class Anglo-Americans of the era.

This authoritative book, sensitive and thorough, is surely the definitive biography of Edith Wharton. Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.