The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. The story is set in the 1870s, in upper-class, "Gilded Age" New York City. Wharton wrote the book in her fifties, after she was already established as a major author in high demand by publishers.
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. Though the committee had initially agreed to give the award to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street, the judges, in rejecting his book on political grounds, "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters.'"
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