The Age of Innocence

Praise for The Age of Innocence
“The first time I read [The Age of Innocence], when I was finished, I held it to my chest and thought, ‘I want to write like this.‘” – Roxane Gay * Entertainment Weekly *
“The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, gets romance right. It gets love right and it’s grounded and it’s beautiful. It’s deeply moving.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates * Interview *
“I generally try to avoid honorifics like ‘best novel ever’ or ‘greatest American novel’ and so on. But The Age of Innocence really is quite incredible, and, at the moment, I consider it the best novel I’ve ever read…it’s a great book executed by a writer at the top of her game.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates * The Atlantic *
“It is one of the best novels of the twentieth century and…a permanent addition to literature.” – New York Times Book Review * October 17, 1920 *
Praise for Edith Wharton
“Edith Wharton is my favorite writer and her incisive indictments of the wealthy class she was a part of, are endlessly interesting to me. I also love her gorgeous descriptions.” – Roxane Gay * Medium *
“What I love about Wharton—the Wharton who wrote The Age of Innocence—is her empathy and ambivalence.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates * The Atlantic *
“Traditionally, Henry James has always been placed slightly higher up the slope of Parnassus than Edith Wharton. But now that the prejudice against the female writer is on the wane, they look to be exactly what they are: giants, equals, the tutelary and benign gods of our American literature.” – Gore Vidal
“Edith Wharton was there before all of us; disdainful, imperious, brilliant foremother.” – Francesca Segal * The Millions *
“Only a few works of fiction can reasonably be called ‘perfect,’ and [Wharton’s Ethan Frome] is one of them. There’s a crystalline purity to the prose, and a wintry sadness in the story. It gets deep in your bones.” – Tom Perrotta * Vulture *
“There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as ‘major,’ and Edith Wharton is one.” – Gore Vidal

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, winner of the Hawthornden Prize, as well as three story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022–2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

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