Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence Annotated Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was her twelfth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine Pictorial Review. Later that year, it was released as a book by D. Appleton & Company. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. The Age of Innocence, which was set in the time of Wharton's childhood, was a softer and gentler work than The House of Mirth, which Wharton had published in 1905. In her autobiography, Wharton wrote of The Age of Innocence that it had allowed her to find "a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914.