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.