SOURCE: "The President and the Lady: Edith Wharton and Theodore Roosevelt," in Bulletin of The New York Public Library, Vol. 69, Jan/Dec., 1965, pp. 49-57.

In the following essay, Tuttleton investigates the significance of a reference to Theodore Roosevelt in Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence as well as the author's lifelong acquaintanceship with Roosevelt.

The facts of our literary history suggest that, in general, the American novelist has not been absorbingly concerned with the interaction of politics and society. Very few American writers, as Irving Howe has rightly observed, "have tried to see politics as a distinctive mode of social existence, with values and manners of its own. Even those who understood that a fruitful subject for the novel might be the idea of politics," he has argued, "could not find enough supporting material in their experience or their environment with which to give this theme a...