The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton

New York: Grosset & Dunlap

1920

Dust jacket signed by "Skrenda". Purple binding with black lettering panels.

Like many other high school students, my first encounter with Edith Wharton was reading what is probably her most well-known work, Ethan Frome. That riveting novella led me to Wharton's other works including arguably her best novel, “The Age of Innocence. Originally published in serial form in the Pictorial Review, this 1920 edition is published "by arrangement with D. Appleton & Company" who published the first edition (also in 1920). What "arrangement" was made between D. Appleton and Grosset & Dunlap” is a mystery--neither of the two major Wharton biographies discuss this matter. Wharton’s reputation, like many writers, has waxed and waned over time. She was very well-regarded during most of her lifetime—she won the Pulitzer prize for the The Age of Innocence, the first woman to do so. However, following her death in 1937, her novels focusing on the upper classes and members of the elite “Four Hundred” were regarded by many as outdated and still others compared her unfavorably to her fellow writer (and contemporary and friend) Henry James although Ethan Frome seems never to have lost its reputation. Then the opening of her papers (in the Beinecke Library at Yale) spurred renewed scholarly interest--R.W.B. Lewis’ biography appeared in 1975 and Hermione Lee’s in 2007—and Wharton is certainly now recognized as a major American novelist whose use of décor as a key to character has had lasting influence on many subsequent writers (Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald among them).

Stuart W. Miller