The close friendship between Edith Wharton and Louis Bromfield evolved toward the end of Wharton's life and during the height of Bromfield's career. Despite the disparity in their ages and backgrounds - he was thirty-four years her junior and a Jeffersonian democrat from the Midwest, she an aristocratic Old New Yorker with a penchant for Hamiltonian economics - the bond between them, described by Bromfield, was "a close bond, as close in many senses as I have ever known".

During the period of their correspondence (1931-1937), Wharton divided her time between the Pavillon Colombe, an eighteenth-century house north of Paris, and Sainte Claire du Vieux Chateau, near Hyeres in the south of France. Bromfield lived not far from the Pavillon Colombe, in Senlis, at the Presbytere de St. Etienne. The gardens of these historic properties and the fervor they inspired in these two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors began a relationship that would endure until Wharton's death in 1937.

Consisting of thirty-two letters, one postcard, and a note from Wharton's secretary to Bromfield's wife, their correspondence gives an insight into the private worlds of these two distinguished writers.