Now, a Literary Moment...

Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence brings us inside the mind of a New York attorney … Newland Archer. The novel is set in the 1870s, but writer P. J. O'Rourke says the book remains compelling today.

P.J. O'Rourke: The Age of Innocence endures for the same reason that I think any other good novel does, which is that it puts us inside somebody's head so thoroughly and so completely. A movie can't do this. Radio can't do this. Paintings and sculpture can't do this.

Edith Wharton has created a person who is absolutely real to us. And it is just absolutely engaging. And the fact that it is not a first-rate mind, or an unusual mind, or by any means a twisted mind, just makes Edith Wharton's genius all the greater.

Writer P.J O'Rourke … talking about The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.

This Literary Moment was created by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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