The Age of Innocence (Books on Film Series) » (Special Value)

One of America's most important novelists, Edith Wharton was a refined, relentless chronicler of the Gilded Age and its social mores. Along with close friend Henry James, she helped define literature at the turn of the 20th century, even as she wrote classic nonfiction on travel, decorating and her own life.

Edith Wharton's 1920 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence is a masterful portrait of desire and betrayal set during the sumptuous Gilded Age of Old New York, a time when society dreaded scandal more than death. This is Newland Archer's milieu as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional May Welland. But when the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love with her. Torn between duty and passion, Archer struggles to make a decision that will either courageously define his life—or mercilessly destroy it. Features a new introduction by Chris Chang, senior editor at Film Comment.

Martin Scorsese, one of the great directors of our time, directs Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder in this luminous adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel about heartache and hypocrisy among the high society of Old New York's Gilded Age. Day-Lewis plays Newland Archer, the upstanding attorney who is engaged to lovely but ordinary socialite May Welland (Ryder, in an Oscar-nominated performance), but who secretly longs for the more passionate life represented by her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska (Pfeiffer). Scorsese's psychologically astute and powerfully romantic film was nominated for five Academy Awards in 1993.