The Greatest Works of Edith Wharton - A Son at the Front - Leatherbound Edition

by Edith Wharton

Overview

Wharton's antiwar masterpiece, now once again available, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781622366064
Publisher:	Greatest Books Publisher
Publication date:	09/01/2013
Pages:	426
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She is the author of such classics in American literature as The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, and Ethan Frome.

Date of Birth:

January 24, 1862

Date of Death:

August 11, 1937

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France

Education:

Educated privately in New York and Europe

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction by Shari Benstock Book One: Chapters I–IX Book Two: Chapters X–XXIII Book Three: Chapters XXIV–XXXI Book Four: Chapters XXXII–XXXVI

Editorial Reviews

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. Because his American parents were visiting France at the time of his birth, George is called to duty in the French army. Campton, his ex-wife, Julia Brant, and her husband, wealthy banker Anderson Brant, immediately butt heads over how to keep George safely at a desk job. Fate intervenes in the person of George himself, who transfers to an infantry regimentto the horror of Julia and the secret admiration of Brant and Campton. As the war rages on, Campton learns not only the value of his son, but empathy and sensitivity: ``never before, at least not consciously, [had] he thought of himself and the few beings he cared for as part of a greater whole.... But the last four months had shown him man as a defenceless animal.... That was what war did; that was why those who best understood it in all its farthest-reaching abomination willingly gave their lives to put an end to it.'' Wharton movingly portrays those left behind during warnot 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. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Extraordinarily poignant.... Heartrending, tragic, powerful, this is not to be missed."—Publishers Weekly

"Wharton has done nothing that equals this."—New York Times Book Review (1923)

"Wharton has painted a moving landscape."—War, Literature & the Arts

From the Publisher