A PULITZER FOR THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

In 1921 Wharton became the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize. She received her award for The Age of Innocence, in the Novel category, now known as the Fiction prize. The Age of Innocence appeared first in serial form in the Pictorial Review in 1920 and was later published as a book by D. Appleton and Company.

Wharton’s Pulitzer certificate from 1921

Though written in 1920, The Age of Innocence is set in the elite New York City society of the 1870s—the world in which Wharton grew up. The novel unfolds from the point of view of Newland Archer, who is engaged to May Welland but in love with Ellen Olenska, who has escaped an unhappy marriage to a Polish count and returns to the New York City community of her youth. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), Wharton describes the writing of The Age of Innocence in the context of the extreme sense of loss she felt following World War I and the 1916 death of her dear friend and fellow writer Henry James. “Meanwhile I found a momentary escape,” she writes, “in going back to my childhood memories of a long-vanished America.”

Wharton recalls showing a passage of the manuscript to a trusted friend, Walter Berry, who responded that he enjoyed the manuscript, but that he and Wharton were “the last people left who can remember New York and Newport as they were then, and nobody else will be interested.” As proven by the novel’s great success, Berry’s prediction did not come true.