<P> The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's twelfth novel, initially serialized in four parts in the Pictorial Review magazine in 1920, and later released by D. Appleton and Company as a book in New York and in London . It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize . Though the committee initially agreed to award the prize to Sinclair Lewis, the judges rejected his Main Street on political grounds and "established Wharton as the American' First Lady of Letters"', the irony being that the committee had awarded The Age of Innocence the prize on grounds that negated Wharton's own blatant and subtle ironies, which constitute and make the book so worthy of attention . The story is set in upper - class New York City in the 1870s, during the Gilded Age . Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she had established herself as a strong author with publishers clamoring for her work . </P> <P> The Age of Innocence was a softer and more gentle work than The House of Mirth, set in the time of her childhood . Wharton wrote, "I found a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long - vanished America...it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914 ." Scholars and readers alike agree that The Age of Innocence is fundamentally a story which struggles to reconcile the old with the new . Wharton was raised in that old world of rigid and proper New York society which features in the story . She spent her middle years, including World War I, in Europe where the devastation of new mechanized warfare was felt most deeply . As explained by Millicent Bell in the Cambridge companion to Wharton, "The Age of Innocence was composed and first read in the aftermath of Roosevelt's death and in the immediate wake of World War I . We frame the ending remembering the multiple losses...not only the loss of Roosevelt but the destruction of the prewar world and all that Wharton valued in it ." With World War I, a definitive line was crossed . There would be no return to the New York of old from which Wharton was raised . And for all that can be condemned in that, there is a certain tenderness with which she crafts the world, "as if she had forgotten nothing ." The novel seems to connect personal innocence with the concept of national innocence . To Robert Martin, The Age of Innocence, was "fundamentally about America and its failure to fulfill its own possibilities". </P> <P> The Age of Innocence centers on an upper - class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of the bride's cousin, plagued by scandal, whose presence threatens their happiness . Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s New York society, it never develops into an outright condemnation of the institution . The novel is noted for Wharton's attention to detail and its accurate portrayal of how the 19th - century East Coast American upper class lived, and the social tragedy of its plot . Wharton was 58 years old at publication; she had lived in that world and had seen it change dramatically by the end of World War I . </P> <P> The title is an ironic comment on the polished outward manners of New York society when compared to its inward machinations . It is believed to have been drawn from the popular 1785 painting A Little Girl by Sir Joshua Reynolds that later became known as The Age of Innocence and was widely reproduced as the commercial face of childhood in the later half of the 18th century . The title, while ironic, was not as caustic as the title of the story featured in The House of Mirth, published in 1905 . </P>

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