Wharton's first literary success, set amid the previously unexplored territory of fashionable New York society, reveals the hypocrisy and destructive effects of the city's social circle on the character of Lily Bart. Impoverished but well-born, Lily must secure her future by acquiring a wealthy husband; but her downfall--initiated by a romantic indiscretion--intensifies with an accumulation of gambling debts and climaxes in a maelstrom of social disasters.