Wharton, Edith

New York. 1962. April 1962. Signet/New American Library. 1st Printing of This Signet Classic Edition. Mark On Bottom Edge, Otherwise Very Good in Wrappers. 0451501063. Foreword By Louis Auchincloss. 288 pages. paperback. CT106. Cover: Lambert. keywords: Signet Classic America Women Literature Paperback. FROM THE PUBLISHER - In this Pulitzer Prize - winning novel, Edith Wharton has written the story of an affable conformist whose marriage of convenience cannot extinguish his passion for another woman . and whose moral limitations make both women seem unreal to him. Handsome, affluent, with great promise as a lawyer, Newland Archer's interest in his cold, beautiful, and conventional wife gradually flags. His attraction to Countess Ellen Olenska - bizarre and challenging, separated from her husband - becomes the single threat to his secure position in high society, and, at the same time, leads him to question the values of that society. The Age of Innocence is a highly sophisticated inquiry into the totems and taboos of nineteenth - century New York elite circles and their crippling effect on natural inclinations. Of the author, whose lifelong preoccupation lay with this facet of society, Edmund Wilson wrote: 'Her tragic heroines and heroes are. passionate or imaginative spirits, hungry for emotional and intellectual experience, who find themselves locked into a small closed system, and either destroy themselves by beating their heads against their prison or suffer a living death in resigning themselves to it. Out of these themes she got a sharp pathos all her own.' Louis Auchincloss calls The Age of Innocence 'The finest of her novels. , painted with a richness of color and detail that delights the imagination. inventory #31061 ISBN: 0451501063.