The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence is a novel by the American author Edith Wharton, published on 25 October 1920. It was her eighth novel and was initially serialised in four parts in the magazine Pictorial Review in 1920, before being released as a book by D. Appleton and Company.

It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. The committee had initially agreed to award it to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street, and its decision to reject his book on political grounds established Wharton, in the words of one account, as the American first lady of letters.

The story is set among upper-class Gilded Age New York in the 1870s, the world Wharton grew up in and spent much of her life leaving, and she wrote the book in her fifties after establishing herself as a major author. The novel's method is an anatomy of that society: its rules are described precisely enough that the reader can see what a breach of them would cost. Newland Archer accepts the standards of that society while recognising their limits, and the novel's tension comes from the space between those two positions.