In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton crafts a masterful portrait of desire, duty, and repression within the rigid social codes of 1870s New York high society. Through the conflicted figure of Newland Archer—torn between the gentle conformity of May Welland and the unconventional, captivating Countess Ellen Olenska—Wharton exposes the quiet tyranny of custom and the tragic cost of moral timidity. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 (the first ever awarded to a woman), this enduring American classic remains a penetrating exploration of love, honor, and the invisible boundaries that shape human lives.
This Barnes & Noble Classics trade paperback edition includes an insightful Introduction and Notes by Maureen Howard, offering valuable historical and literary context that deepens appreciation of Wharton’s social critique and narrative artistry.
About the Author
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was one of the most distinguished American novelists of the early twentieth century and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded in 1921 for The Age of Innocence. Born into New York’s elite society, Wharton drew deeply from her intimate knowledge of its customs, hierarchies, and unspoken rules, transforming personal observation into sharp social critique. Her fiction—marked by psychological depth, moral complexity, and elegant prose—examines themes of duty, desire, class, and the constraints placed particularly upon women. In addition to novels such as The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome, she produced short stories, travel writing, memoir, and criticism. Wharton spent much of her later life in France and was widely respected on both sides of the Atlantic as a major literary figure of realism and social commentary.
