Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence was published, later winning her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
On September 20, 1920, Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence was published by D. Appleton and Company. Set in the 1870s among the upper echelons of New York society, the novel follows lawyer Newland Archer as he is torn between his conventional fiancée May Welland and her unconventional, socially ostracized cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska.
Written with the benefit of historical distance—looking back from the vantage of the post-World War I era to the vanished world of her youth—the novel offers a nuanced, elegiac, and often ironic portrait of the rigid social codes that governed old New York, codes Wharton had both lived within and critiqued throughout her career.
The novel was an immediate critical success, praised for its precise social observation, psychological depth, and masterful prose. Its publication represented the culmination of Wharton's decades-long literary preoccupation with the constraints imposed by wealth, class, and gender upon individual desire and freedom. The following year, The Age of Innocence would earn Wharton the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making her the first woman to receive that honor. The novel remains her most celebrated work, adapted for film and stage numerous times, and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of American literature and a definitive chronicle of Gilded Age New York society.