“How much longer,” Edith Wharton lamented in a July 1919 letter to Barrett Wendell, “are we going to think it necessary to be ‘American’ before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?” She was having her publishers send him her most recent book, French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), a collection of essays written in large part to instruct her compatriots in the ways of an exemplary civilization. Wharton's complaint found its way into her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, which she began working on soon after French Ways was published; though in this instance it was voiced from a different quarter and had potentially radical implications.