Fiction · 1920
The Age of Innocence
New York in the 1870s: Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland when her cousin, the Countess Olenska, returns from a disastrous European marriage, and everything he has taken for granted about his world comes into question. Edith Wharton published the novel in 1920; it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year, the first awarded to a woman.
Wharton wrote it in France just after the war, looking back fifty years at the New York she was born into, and she treated that world as an archaeologist treats a site: the dinner tables, the opera boxes, the calling cards, the exact order in which a family may be told anything. Its cruelty is that it never has to raise its voice.
The two books are given complete, to the Paris chapter that closes them.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of American Literature.
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About the author
1862–1937 · Modern
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones into old New York society, published her first book, on interior decoration, in 1897, and her first novel in 1902. The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920), which won the Pulitzer Prize, are the best known of more than forty books. She lived in France from 1907 and was decorated for her relief work in the First World War.
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