Edith Wharton (1862–1937) by birth and upbringing was closely connected with the “eminent” New York bourgeoisie. This did not stop the writer from providing insightful criticism of the claims of the American propertied elite to moral and aesthetic dominance in the life of the country. Having started her literary career relatively late, Edith Wharton managed with her novels and stories to make a significant contribution to critical-realist American prose of the first third of the 20th century. She died in France, where she spent the last years of her life. “False Dawn” was published in the collection “Old New York” (1924). The conflict depicted in the story is partly based on actual facts from the biography of James Jackson Jarvis (1818–1888), an American connoisseur and collector of early Italian Renaissance paintings, unrecognized and ridiculed in New York and Boston during approximately the same years as his young Lewis Racey in Too Early Dawn.