Awards
Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize,
The Age of Innocence is an elegant, masterful portrait of desire and betrayal in old New York.
With vivid power, Wharton evokes a time of gaslit streets, formal
dances held in the ballrooms of stately brownstones, and society people
"who dreaded scandal more than disease." This is Newland Archer's world
as he prepares to many the docile May Welland. Then, suddenly, the
mysterious, intensely nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska returns to
New York after a long absence, turning Archer's world upside down.
This classic Wharton tale of thwarted love is an exuberantly comic
and profoundly moving look at the passions of the human heart, as well
as a literary achievement of the highest order.
About the Author
America's most famous woman of letters, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, Edith Wharton
was born into one of the last "leisured class" families in New York
City, as she put it, in 1862. Educated privately, she was married to
Edward Wharton in 1885, and for the next few years they spent their time
in the high society of Newport, Rhode Island, then Lenox,
Massachusetts, and Europe. It was in Europe that Wharton first met Henry
James, who was to have a profound and lasting influence on her life and
work.
Wharton's first published book was a work of nonfiction in
collaboration with Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses (1897),
but from early on, her marriage had been a source of distress, and she
was advised by her doctor to write fiction to relieve her nervous
tension. Wharton's first short stories appeared in Scribner's Magazine, and although she published several volumes of fiction around the turn of the century, including The Greater Inclination (1899), The Touchstone (1900), Crucial Instances (1901), The Valley of Decision (1902), Sanctuary (1903), and The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904), it was not until the publication of the bestselling The House of Mirth
in 1905 that she was recognized as one of the most important novelists
of her time for her keen social insight and subtle sense of satire. In
1906 Wharton visited Paris, which inspired Madame de Treymes
(1907), and made her home there in 1907, finally divorcing her husband
in 1913. The years before the outbreak of World War I represent the core
of her artistic achievement with the publication of Ethan Frome in 1911, The Reef in 1912, and The Custom of the Country
in 1913. During the war she remained in France organizing relief for
Belgian refugees, for which she was later awarded the Legion of Honor.
She also wrote two novels about the war, The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front
(1923), and although living in France she continued to write about New
England and the Newport society she knew so well and described in Summer (1917), the companion to Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence ( 1920), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Old New York (1924), The Mother's Recompense ( 1925), The Writing of Fiction (1925), The Children (1928), Hudson River Bracketed (1929), and her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). She died in France in 1937.