Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones. A member of a distinguished New York family, she was educated privately in America and abroad. During her life, she published more than forty volumes: novels, stories, verse, essays, travel books, and memoirs. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Age of Innocence, in 1921.

Elif Batuman is the author of The Idiot, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2010.

Sarah Blackwood is an associate professor of English at Pace University. Her criticism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

PENGUIN VITAE NEW HARDCOVER SERIES: Penguin Classics presents Penguin Vitae, a new deluxe hardcover series featuring a dynamic landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction that have shaped the course of our readers' lives. Penguin Vitae invites readers to find themselves in a diverse world of storytellers, with beautifully designed classic editions of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement and creative originality.

PENGUIN CLASSICS BOOK DESIGN: Penguin Vitae is a collectible series of vibrant foil stamped hardcovers with colored endpapers and high-quality paper. Penguin Vitae marks an exciting next chapter in our Classics hardcover series program, following the acclaimed series book designs of The Penguin Galaxy, Penguin Drop Caps, and Penguin Horror under Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, and the Clothbound Classics designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

CALL FOR DIVERSE CLASSICS: From campaigns such as #WeNeedDiverseBooks to

customer requests for beautiful hardcover editions of a wider representation of classic

authors, Penguin Vitae aims to provide an exciting and inclusive, highly collectible series

of beloved books ready for new discovery.

FOREWORD BY ELIF BATUMAN: Batuman is the bestselling author of The Idiot, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and has a new book forthcoming February 2021. She is also a staff writer at the New Yorker.

FEMINIST CLASSICS: This new edition of The Age of Innocence feature an introduction by Sarah Blackwood that casts the book in a more feminist light, and will sit alongside our growing list of new and reissued feminist classics, including Kate Chopin's The Awakening, The Women's Suffrage Movement, Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper, and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.