The Age of Innocence

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Edith Wharton's novel, The Age of Innocence, was published in 1920. It was her eighth novel, first serialized in four parts in the magazine Pictorial Review in 1920. D. Appleton & Company published it as a book later that year. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making Wharton the first woman to do so. Though the committee initially agreed to award the prize to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street, the judge's rejection of his book on political grounds "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters, '" according to the judges. The story occurs in upper-class, "Gilded Age" New York City in the 1870s. Wharton wrote the book in her fifties after establishing herself as a significant author in high demand by publishers. The Age of Innocence, set during Wharton's childhood, was a softer and gentler work than The House of Mirth, which she published in 1905. Wharton wrote in her autobiography that The Age of Innocence gave her "a momentary escape in returning to my childish memories of a long-vanished America. It was becoming more and more evident that 1914 had destroyed the world I had grown up in and formed. Scholars and readers agree that The Age of Innocence is fundamentally about reconciling the old and the new.