Age of Desire (Fields)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 25, 1953
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Illinois; M.F.A,
   Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in Nashville, TN


Jennie Fields is an American novelist. Her fourth novel is The Age of Desire, based on the life of American writer Edith Wharton.

Fields had a successful career in advertising, starting as a copywriter in Chicago, and going on to become a creative director at several international advertising agencies in Chicago and New York. Her advertising credits include McDonald's jingles (while at DDB Needham), including "Menu Chant", which was sung by, among others, Carl Giammarese of The Buckinghams, the "We're All Connected" campaign for New York Telephone (while at Young & Rubicam), and the Lunesta Moth campaign (while at McCann Erickson) for which she won an Effie award.

Fields has published four novels: Lily Beach; Crossing Brooklyn Ferry; The Middle Ages; and The Age of Desire. Her first novel Lily Beach (1997), is the story of a young artist in the 1960s, struggling to find her place in a rapidly changing world. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, (1997) is the story of six people who live on the same street in Brooklyn, and what happens to them over the course of a year. Her third novel, The Middle Ages (2002,) tells the story of an architect who only finds the life she's really seeking when she loses her job.

In 2012, Fields published The Age of Desire ( 2012) based on the life of American author Edith Wharton. The novel centers on Wharton's illicit affair with journalist William Morton Fullerton and that affair's effect on both her unstable husband, Edward R. "Teddy" Wharton, and her close friendship with her lifelong friend and confidant, her literary secretary Anna Bahlmann. Until recently, little had been known about Bahlmann but Fields was one of the first to have access to over 100 previously unknown letters from Wharton to Bahlmann that were auctioned in 2009. The letters are now in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and form the basis of another 2012 publication, My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann by Irene Goldman-Price.

Fields' books have been published in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)