Edith Wharton Wins Pulitzer
One hundred years ago today … Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize as the best US novel of 1920. Wharton and Zona Gale, who won in the drama category, were the first women to win Pulitzers.
New York Herald, 4 February 1921, p. 4. Newspapers.com.
The Herald reported:
To Mrs. Edith Wharton was awarded a $1,000 Pulitzer prize for her novel, "The Age of Innocence," as "the American novel published during the year which best presented the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood."
(“Columbia Awards Medals and $30,000 Prizes in the Arts.” New York Herald, 30 May 1921, p. 7.)
Note: NY1920s has featured Wharton several times. Click here for our post about the publication of The Age of Innocence in October, 1920.
The Pulitzers were bestowed by Columbia University then, as now. They were a recent invention, having originated in 1917.
Gale won for her play Miss Lulu Betts.
– Jonathan Goldman, May 29, 2021
TAGS: Women writers, fiction, modernism, modernist literature, theater, plays, awards, prestige