Pulitzer Prize Fiction Winner
The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Summary
Set among the rigid drawing rooms of 1870s New York high society, the novel follows Newland Archer, a young lawyer whose engagement to the conventional May Welland collides with his attraction to her cosmopolitan cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska. Wharton's polished irony and ethnographic eye dissect the unwritten rules and silent cruelties of the old upper class. Readers widely regard the book as one of the great American novels of manners.
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Historical Context & Significance
Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The jury originally picked Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street," but the board rejected it as too "subversive."