1.
Joseph Pulitzer
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Joseph Pulitzer was a Hungarian-American newspaper publisher of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the New York World. Pulitzer introduced the techniques of yellow journalism to the newspapers he acquired in the 1880s and he became a leading national figure in the Democratic Party and was elected congressman from New York. He crusaded against big business and corruption, and helped keep the Statue of Liberty in New York. Today, he is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes, which were established in 1917 by money he bequeathed to Columbia University to recognize artistic and journalistic achievements in the United States. The prizes are given annually to award achievements in American journalism and photography, as well as literature and history, poetry, music, Pulitzer founded the Columbia School of Journalism by his philanthropic bequest, it opened in 1912. He was born as Pulitzer József in Makó, about 200 km south-east of Budapest in Hungary, the Pulitzers were among several Jewish families living in the area, and had established a reputation as merchants and shopkeepers. Josephs father was a businessman, regarded as the second of the foremost merchants of Makó. Their ancestors emigrated from Moravia to Hungary at the end of the 18th century, in 1853, Fülöp Pulitzer was rich enough to retire. He moved his family to Pest, where he had the children educated by private tutors, in 1858, after Fülöps death, his business went bankrupt, and the family became impoverished. Joseph attempted to enlist in various European armies for work before emigrating to the United States, Pulitzer arrived in Boston in 1864 at the age of 17, his passage having been paid by Massachusetts military recruiters who were seeking soldiers for the long American Civil War. Learning that the recruiters were pocketing the lions share of his enlistment bounty, Pulitzer snuck away from the Deer Island recruiting station and he was paid $200 to enroll in the Lincoln Cavalry on September 30. He was a part of Sheridans troopers, in the First New York Lincoln Cavalry in Company L. where he served for eight months. Although he spoke three languages, German, Hungarian, and French, Pulitzer learned little English until after the war because his regiment was composed mostly of German immigrants, after the war, Pulitzer returned to New York City, where he stayed briefly. He moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts for the whaling industry and he returned to New York with little money. Flat broke, he slept in wagons on cobblestone side streets and he decided to travel by side-door Pullman to St. Louis, Missouri. He sold his one possession, a handkerchief, for 75 cents. When Pulitzer arrived at the city, he recalled, The lights of St. Louis looked like a land to me. In the city, his German was as useful as it was in Munich because of the large ethnic German population, in the Westliche Post, he saw an ad for a mule hostler at Benton Barracks
2.
Booth Tarkington
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Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. He is one of only three novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner, Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. He was named after his maternal uncle Newton Booth, then the governor of California and he was also related to Chicago Mayor James Hutchinson Woodworth through Woodworths wife Almyra Booth Woodworth. Tarkington first attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, but completed his education at Phillips Exeter Academy. He attended Purdue University for two years, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity and the universitys Morley Eating Club and he later made substantial donations to Purdue for building an all-mens residence hall, which the university named Tarkington Hall in his honor. Purdue awarded him an honorary doctorate, some of his familys wealth returned after the Panic of 1873, and his mother transferred Booth from Purdue to Princeton University. At Princeton, Tarkington is said to have known as Tark among his fellow Eating Club members. He was active as a student-actor and served as president of Princetons Dramatic Association, according to Triangles official history, Tarkington made his first acting appearance in the clubs Shakespearean spoof Katherine. This was one of the first three productions in the Triangles history that was written and produced by Princeton students, Tarkington established this Triangle tradition for productions of students plays, and it remains to the present day. Tarkington returned to the Triangle stage as Cassius in the 1893 production The Honorable Julius Caesar and he gained prominence that year at Princeton as a co-author of the play. In addition to his role as a member of The Triangle Club, he was also among the earliest members of the Ivy Club. He edited the Princetons Nassau Literary Magazine, known more recently as The Nassau Lit, while an undergraduate, he is known to have socialized with Woodrow Wilson, an associate graduate member of the Ivy Club. Wilson returned to Princeton as a member of the science faculty shortly before Tarkington matriculated. Tarkington failed to earn his degree of A. B. because of missing a single course in the classics. Nevertheless, his place within campus society was determined. In his adult life, he was asked to return to Princeton for the conferral of honorary degrees, an A. M. in 1899. The conferral of more than one honorary degree on an alumnus of Princeton University remains a university record, while Tarkington never earned a college degree, he was accorded many awards recognizing and honoring his skills and accomplishments as an author. He won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction twice, in 1919 and 1922, for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons, in 1921 booksellers rated him the most significant contemporary American author in a poll conducted by Publishers Weekly
3.
Ernest Poole
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Ernest Cook Poole was an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. Poole was the winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded in 1918 for his book, Ernest Cook Poole was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 23,1880 to Abram Poole and Mary Howe Poole. His Wisconsin-born father was a commodities trader at the Chicago Board of Trade, his mother hailed from a well-established Chicago family. Poole was educated at home until he was almost 7 years old, there he first showed a proclivity for the written word, working briefly on the staff of the school newspaper. He had a youth, spending summers at the familys seasonal home at Lake Forest. Following high school graduation, Poole, an accomplished violinist, took a year off to study music and he found the process of writing music difficult, however, and — inspired by his literary-oriented and story-telling father — turned his attention to the written word as a possible profession. After his year-long escape from formal education, Poole moved to Princeton, New Jersey to attend Princeton University, there he continued to demonstrate an interest in journalism and fiction writing, working on the staff of the schools daily newspaper, The Prince — before finding straight journalism tedious. Poole graduated from Princeton cum laude in 1902 and immediately moved to New York City to live in the University Settlement House on the citys impoverished Lower East Side, payment for the freelance effort was received and confidence boosted. The next phase of Pooles life, that of a writer, had begun. Headstrong and confident, Poole immersed himself in his passion, fiction, three short stories were immediately penned and sent out to various New York magazines — only to be returned with letters of rejection. Pooles settlement house was active teaching classes and housing club groups during the day. G, wells and left wing politicians Kier Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, as well as renowned attorney Clarence Darrow. Acquaintances were made and ideas absorbed by Poole, who increased in commitment to attempt to the wrongs of society through intelligent social reform. The tipping point for the 23-year old Poole as a settlement worker came when he was selected to investigate the problem of tuberculosis in New York Citys Lower East Side tenement slums. Poole spent weeks going from room to room observing and surveying residents, the task proved a strain on Pooles mental and physical well-being and he himself became feverish and was sent home to the family summer home in Lake Forest to recuperate. Pooles time as a settlement worker at an end, he through himself into investigative journalism, when his Outlook piece was completed, Poole stayed on the scene as the volunteer press agent for the union of the striking slaughterhouse workers. The job put him in touch with the young Upton Sinclair, Pooles close friends in New York included two others who would travel to Imperial Russia as correspondents in 1905 — the socialists Arthur Bullard and William English Walling. Back in New York, Poole met the émigré Russian revolutionary Yekaterina Breshkovskaya, Pooles interview would ultimately result in a pamphlet issued by the Chicago socialist publishing house Charles H. Fascinated by the tumultuous Russian political situation, Poole successfully convinced The Outlook to send him to Russia as the magazines correspondent and a contract was drawn up
4.
Edith Wharton
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Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927,1928 and 1930, Wharton combined her insiders view of Americas privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her eras other literary and public figures, Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander at their brownstone at 14 West Twenty-third Street in New York City. She had two older brothers, Frederic Rhinelander, who was sixteen, and Henry Edward, who was eleven. She was baptized April 20,1862, Easter Sunday, at Grace Church, to her friends and family she was known as Pussy Jones. The saying keeping up with the Joneses is said to refer to her fathers family and she was also related to the Rensselaer family, the most prestigious of the old patroon families. She had a lifelong friendship with her Rhinelander niece, landscape architect Beatrix Farrand of Reef Point in Bar Harbor. Edith was born during the Civil War, she was three years old when the South surrendered, after the war, the family traveled extensively in Europe. From 1866 to 1872, the Jones family visited France, Italy, Germany, during her travels, the young Edith became fluent in French, German, and Italian. At the age of ten, she suffered from typhoid fever while the family was at a spa in the Black Forest, after the family returned to the United States in 1872, they spent their winters in New York and their summers in Newport, Rhode Island. While in Europe, she was educated by tutors and governesses and she rejected the standards of fashion and etiquette that were expected of young girls at the time, intended to enable women to marry well and to be displayed at balls and parties. She thought these requirements were superficial and oppressive, Edith wanted more education than she received, so she read from her fathers library and from the libraries of her fathers friends. Her mother forbade her to read novels until she was married, Edith began writing poetry and fiction as a young girl. She attempted to write a novel at age eleven and her first publication was a translation of the German poem, Was die Steine Erzählen by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, which earned her $50. Her family did not wish her name to appear in print because the names of upper class women of the time appeared in print to announce birth, marriage. Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friends father and he was a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson and supported womens education. He played a role in Ediths efforts to educate herself. In 1877, at the age of 15, she wrote a 30,000 word novella Fast
5.
Willa Cather
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Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers. The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia, in 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and she lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. Cather was born Wilella Sibert Cather in 1873 on her grandmothers farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather, whose family had lived on land in the valley for six generations, Cathers family originated in Wales, the family name deriving from Cadair Idris, a mountain in Gwynedd.13 Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher. Within a year of Cathers birth, the moved to Willow Shade. At the urging of Charles Cathers parents, the moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old. Cathers time in the state, still on the frontier, was a deeply formative experience for her. She made house calls with the physician, Dr. Robert Damerell. After Cathers essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal during her year at the University of Nebraska. In addition to her work with the paper, Cather also served as the managing editor of The Hesperian, the University of Nebraskas student newspaper. She changed her plans to major in science and become a physician, Stout calls this story one of several Cather works that demonstrate the speciousness of rigid gender roles and give favorable treatment to characters who undermine conventions. Cathers first collection of stories, The Troll Garden, was published in 1905 by McClure, Phillips. It contains several of Cathers best-known stories—A Wagner Matinee, The Sculptors Funeral, in 1906 Cather moved to New York City after being offered a position on the editorial staff of McClures Magazine, a periodical connected with the publisher of The Troll Garden the year before. During her first year at McClures she wrote a biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, although Georgine Milmine. McClures serialized Cathers first novel, Alexanders Bridge, the New York Times praised the dramatic situations and the clever conversations,225 and The Atlantic called the writing deft and skillful. Cather followed Alexanders Bridge with her Prairie Trilogy, O Pioneers, the Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. These works became popular and critical successes
6.
Sinclair Lewis
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Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars and he is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, there was ever a novelist among us with a call to the trade. It is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds and he has been honored by the U. S. Postal Service with a postage stamp in the Great Americans series. Born February 7,1885, in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis began reading books at a young age and he had two siblings, Fred and Claude. His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician, Lewiss mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891. The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently enjoyed, throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat pop-eyed—had trouble gaining friends and pined after various local girls. At the age of 13 he unsuccessfully ran away from home, Lewis was also nonreligious and an atheist. In late 1902 Lewis left home for a year at Oberlin Academy to qualify for acceptance by Yale University, while at Oberlin, he developed a religious enthusiasm that waxed and waned for much of his remaining teenage years. Lewiss unprepossessing looks, fresh country manners and seemingly self-important loquacity made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and he did initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer. Lewiss earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant, after graduation Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, write fiction for publication and to chase away boredom. While working for newspapers and publishing houses, he developed a facility for turning out shallow and he also earned money by selling plots to Jack London, including one for the latters unfinished novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. Lewiss first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham. Sinclair Lewiss first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn, The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk, A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life and The Job. That same year saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents, A Story for Lovers. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919, in 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger, an editor at Vogue magazine. They had one son, Wells Lewis, named after British author H. G. Wells, Wells Lewis was killed in action while serving in the U. S. Army in World War II during the rescue of the Lost Battalion in the Forêt de Champ in France. On May 14,1928, he married Dorothy Thompson, a newspaper columnist
7.
Thornton Wilder
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Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the two plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth — and a U. S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day. Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Amos Parker Wilder, an editor and U. S. diplomat. All of the Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China and his older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, was Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, a noted poet, and instrumental in developing the field of theopoetics. His sister, Isabel, was an accomplished writer, both of his other sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist, attended Mount Holyoke College. Wilder began writing plays while at The Thacher School in Ojai, California, according to a classmate, We left him alone, just left him alone. And he would retire at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and his family lived for a time in China, where his sister Janet was born in 1910. He attended the English China Inland Mission Chefoo School at Yantai but returned with his mother, Thornton also attended Creekside Middle School in Berkeley, and graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915. He earned his Master of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton University in 1926, after graduating, Wilder studied in archaeology and Italian in Rome, Italy, and then taught French at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey beginning in 1921. His first novel, The Cabala, was published in 1926, in 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought him commercial success, and his first Pulitzer Prize. He resigned from the Lawrenceville School in 1928, from 1930 to 1937 he taught at the University of Chicago, during which time he published his translation of André Obeys own adaptation of the tale, Le Viol de Lucrece under the title Lucrece. In 1938 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Our Town, world War II saw him rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U. S. Army Air Force Intelligence, first in Africa, then in Italy until 1945. He received several awards for his military service and he went on to be a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he served for a year as the Charles Eliot Norton professor. In 1968 he won the National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day, also, Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired, asked him to write the screenplay to his thriller, Shadow of a Doubt. He completed the first draft of the screenplay for Hitchcock, the Bridge of San Luis Rey tells the story of several unrelated people who happen to be on a bridge in Peru when it collapses, killing them. Philosophically, the book explores the question of why unfortunate events occur to people who seem innocent or undeserving. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and in 1998 it was selected by the board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century. The book was quoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the service for victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001
8.
William Faulkner
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William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and he is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally, two of his works, A Fable and his last novel The Reivers, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Absalom, Absalom. is often included on similar lists, Faulkner was born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler. He had three brothers, Murry Charles Jack Falkner, author John Faulkner, and Dean Swift Falkner. Soon after his first birthday, his family moved to Ripley, Mississippi, Murry hoped to inherit the railroad from his father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, but John had little confidence in Murrys ability to run a business and sold it for $75,000. Following the sale of the business, Murry became disappointed and planned a new start for his family by moving to Texas. Maud, however, disagreed with this proposition, and it was decided that they would move to Oxford, Mississippi, where Murrys father owned several businesses, making it easy for Murry to find work. Thus, four days prior to Williams fifth birthday on September 21,1902, the Falkner family settled in Oxford and his family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline Callie Barr crucially influenced the development of Faulkners artistic imagination. Both his mother and grandmother were avid readers and also painters and photographers, while Murry enjoyed the outdoors and encouraged his sons to hunt, track, and fish, Maud valued education and took pleasure in reading and going to church. She taught her sons to read before sending them to school and exposed them to classics such as Charles Dickens. Faulkners lifelong education by Callie Barr is central to his novels preoccupations with the politics of sexuality, as a schoolchild, Faulkner had much success early on. He excelled in the first grade, skipped the second, and continued doing well through the third, however, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth grades of his schooling, Faulkner became a much more quiet and withdrawn child. He began to play hooky occasionally and became indifferent to his schoolwork. The decline of his performance in school continued, and Faulkner wound up repeating the eleventh, and then final grade, Faulkner also spent much of his boyhood listening to stories told to him by his elders. These included war stories shared by the old men of Oxford and stories told by Barr of the Civil War, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Falkner family. Faulkners grandfather would tell him of the exploits of Williams great-grandfather, after whom he was named, William Clark Falkner, who was a successful businessman, writer. Telling stories about William Clark Falkner, whom the family called Old Colonel, had become something of a family pastime when Faulkner was a boy
9.
John Updike
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John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954 and he also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his Rabbit series, which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry Rabbit Angstrom over the course of several decades, both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize. Updike populated his fiction with characters who frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations and his work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the great American writers of his time. He described his style as an attempt to give the mundane its beautiful due, Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised in the nearby small town of Shillington. The family later moved to the village of Plowville. His mothers attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike, one of my earliest memories, he later recalled, is of seeing her at her desk. I admired the writers equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper, and I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in. These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels, Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and attended Harvard with a full scholarship. He received recognition for his writing as a teenager by winning a Scholastic Art, at Harvard, he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented and prolific contributor to the Harvard Lampoon, of which he served as president. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, upon graduation, Updike attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist. After returning to the United States, Updike and his moved to New York. This was the beginning of his writing career. Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a staff writer for only two years, writing Talk of the Town columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories came to fill his early books like The Carpentered Hen. These works were influenced by Updikes early engagement with The New Yorker and this early work also featured the influence of J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov. During this time, Updike underwent a spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of faith, he began reading Søren Kierkegaard
10.
1917 in literature
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This article presents lists of literary events and publications in 1917. January Francis Picabia produces the first issue of the Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona, J. R. R. February 4/5 – English writer Hugh Kingsmill is taken prisoner while fighting in France. February 16 – The publishing house of Boni & Liveright is established in New York City by Horace Liveright with Albert Boni, and establishes the Modern Library imprint. April – Leonard and Virginia Woolf take delivery of the printing press they require in order to establish the Hogarth Press at their home. Their first publication is Two Stories, june 4 – The first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded, Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Swope receives the first Pulitzer for journalism for his work for the New York World. June 18 – Luigi Pirandellos drama Right You Are is premièred in Milan, summer – The Siuru expressionistic and neo-romantic literary movement in Estonia is formed by a group of young poets and writers. October 20 – 51-year-old poet W. B, yeats marries 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees at Harrow Road register office in London a couple of months after having had a proposal of marriage to his ex-mistresss daughter, Iseult Gonne, rejected. December 25 – Jesse Lynch Williams Why Marry, the first dramatic play to win a Pulitzer Prize, opens at the Astor Theatre. The colonial government of the Dutch East Indies establishes the Kantoor voor de Volklectuur, the Marc Chagall illustrated version of The Magician by I. L. Peretz is published in Vilnius. This is the background to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns novels in The Red Wheel sequence March 1917, august 18 – First meeting between Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the basis of Stephen MacDonalds drama Not About Heroes and Pat Barkers novel Regeneration
11.
The Age of Innocence
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It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s, Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she had established herself as a strong author with publishers clamoring for her work. The Age of Innocence was a softer and more work than The House of Mirth. Wharton wrote, I found an 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, 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 old world of rigid and proper New York society which features in the story. She spent her 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, 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. This intones the title word innocence, as the novel seems to connect personal innocence with that of national innocence, to Robert Martin, The Age of Innocence, was fundamentally about America and its failure to fulfill its own possibilities. The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couples impending marriage, 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. The title is a comment on the polished outward manners of New York society when compared to its inward machinations. The title, while ironic, was not as caustic as the title of story featured in the The House of Mirth, published in 1905. Newland Archer, gentleman lawyer and heir to one of New York Citys best families, is happily anticipating a highly desirable marriage to the sheltered, yet he finds reason to doubt his choice of bride after the appearance of Countess Ellen Olenska, Mays exotic and beautiful 30-year-old cousin. Ellen has returned to New York from Europe after scandalously separating herself from a bad marriage to a Polish count. As Newlands admiration for the countess grows, so does his doubt about marrying May, Ellens decision to divorce Count Olenski causes a social crisis for the other members of her family, who are terrified of scandal and disgrace. Living apart can be tolerated, but divorce is unacceptable, to save the Welland familys reputation, a law partner of Newland asks him to dissuade Countess Olenska from divorcing the count
12.
Alice Adams (novel)
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Alice Adams is a 1921 novel by Booth Tarkington that received the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It was adapted as a film in 1923 by Rowland V. Lee and, more famously, the narrative centers on the character of a young woman who aspires to climb the social ladder and win the affections of a wealthy young man named Arthur Russell. The story is set in a household in an unnamed town in the Midwest shortly after World War I. The novel begins with Virgil Adams confined to bed with an unnamed illness, there is tension between Virgil and his wife over how he should go about recovering, and she pressures him not to return to work for J. A. Alice, their daughter, attempts to keep peace in the family before walking to her friend Mildred Palmers house to see what Mildred will wear to a dance that evening. After Alices return, she spends the day preparing for the dance, going out to pick violets for a bouquet, as she cannot afford to buy flowers for herself. Her brother, Walter, initially refuses to accompany her to the dance, but as Alice cannot go without an escort, Mrs. Adams prevails upon Walter, and he rents a Tin Lizzie to drive Alice to the dance. Alice forces him to dance with her at first, as it will be an embarrassment for her to stand alone. She leaves the dance horribly embarrassed after Arthur discovers Walters gambling with the servants, the next day, Alice goes on an errand for her father into town, passing Frinckes Business College on the way with a shudder. On the walk home, she encounters Arthur Russell, who shows an obvious interest in her. Arthur returns, several days later, and his courtship of Alice continues, Mrs. Adams uses Alices distress to finally goad Virgil into setting up a glue factory. It is eventually revealed that the recipe was developed by Virgil and another man under the direction. Lamb, who over the years declined to take up its production despite repeated proddings from Virgil, although initially reluctant to steal from Mr. Lamb, Virgil finally persuades himself that his improvements to the recipe over the years has made it virtually his. As Arthur continues his courtship of Alice, Alice continues spinning a web of lies to preserve the image of herself. This becomes especially difficult when she and Arthur encounter Walter in a bad part of town, at home, Walter is confronted by his father, who demands that Walter quit Lambs to help in setting up the glue factory. Walter refuses to help his father without a cash advance. Virgil arranges to resign from Lambs employ without speaking to him face-to-face, as he fears the old mans reaction, and puts the glue factory into operation. Mrs. Adams decides to arrange a dinner so that Arthur can meet the family, Walter again demands cash from his father without explaining why he needs it, and is again rebuffed
. The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-04-19. 
