In the following essay, Walton explores Wharton 's nostalgic treatment of " Old New York" in The Age of Innocence.

Although Walter Berry prophesied that nobody else except themselves would be interested in the New York of her childhood, The Age of Innocence, 1920, was serialized in The Pictorial Review and was, almost inevitably, awarded the Pulitzer Prize and has become one of Edith Wharton's most widely read and admired works. It has all the ingredients of a historical best-seller, a richly detailed period setting, an emotional situation that the modern reader can flatter himself, or more important, herself would work out more happily at the present day and, combined with the appeal to critical superiority, a pervasive nostalgia for the past. It is, with all its faults, manifestly the product of a distinguished creative mind, if in a consciously relaxed mood, and it does not suffer from the...