Edith Wharton

A Son At the Front Edith Wharton

Inspired by a young man Edith Wharton met during her war relief work in France, A Son at the Front (1923) opens in Paris on July 30, 1914, as Europe totters on the brink of war. Expatriate American painter John Campton, whose only son George, having been born in Paris, must report for duty in the French army, struggles to keep his son away from the front while grappling with the moral implications of doing so. A poignant meditation on art and possession, fidelity and responsibility, A Son at the Front is Wharton's indelible take on the war novel."Largely criticized or ignored by a war-weary public when it was originally published in 1922, A Son at the Front is an extraordinarily poignant novel chronicling the effects of WWI on painter John Campton and his only child, George. . . . Wharton movingly portrays those left behind during war-not the wives and children but the devastated parents, who are forced to go on living at the cost of their own flesh and blood. Heartrending, tragic, powerful, this is not to be missed."-Publishers WeeklyEdith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, and designer. A prolific career that stretched over forty years and included the publication of more than forty books, among them such classics as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt. Wharton's antiwar masterpiece probes the devastation of World War I on the home front. Interweaving her own experiences of the Great War with themes of parental and filial love, art and self-sacrifice, national loyalties and class privilege, Wharton tells an intimate and captivating story of war behind the lines.