In The Children, an instant bestseller when it was first published in 1928, Edith Wharton created a comic, bittersweet novel about the misadventures of a bachelor and a band of precocious children. The seven Wheater children, stepbrothers and-sisters grown weary of being shuttled from parent to parent 'like bundles, ' are eager for their parents' latest reconciliation to last. A chance meeting between the children and the solitary forty-six-year old Martin Boyne leads to a series of unforgettable encounters.