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Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.��

First I must comment that this is not one of my favorite classic. But I do admire Wharton's ambition, the fact that she volunteered to help others who desperately needed it. One example is her relief volunteer in France during Word War I. One thing that few people noticed (at that time) was when she received the the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. "The Columbia trustees praised Wharton’s twelfth novel for its “wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.�� Wharton wondered whether they had really understood her title?!

The three fiction judges—literary critic Stuart Pratt Sherman, literature professor Robert Morss Lovett, and novelist Hamlin Garland—voted to give the prize to Sinclair Lewis for his epic satire Main Street, but Columbia University’s advisory board, led by conservative university president Nicholas Murray Butler, overturned their decision and awarded the prize to The Age of Innocence. (Pulitzer had originally stipulated that the award be bestowed on the novel that best represented the “whole atmosphere of American life,�� but Butler had changed the wording to “w��DZ�����dz���.�� Outraged, Sherman and Lovett protested the decision in the pages of The New Republic.

Now the review -- Set in the old New York, of the early 1870s, Wharton's novel is an examination of the tension between society’s demands and personal freedom. Newland Archer is a young man from a wealthy family about to be married to May Welland, a sweet but unimaginative young lady. A bookish dilettante, he leads a comfortable life among New York’s moneyed set. However, his life is turned upside down with the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska, a damaged woman fleeing her troubled marriage to a European count. In contrast to conventional May, Ellen goes against the grain, spurning society’s expectations. Newland is immediately drawn to the more free-spirited cousin. Devasted, Newland follows through with his promise to May, while he secretly yearns for Ellen. ()