NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 When World War I broke out in 1914, Edith Wharton’s<\/a> initial response was less as a storyteller in search of material than as a citizen and intrepid witness.<\/p>\n The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of \u201cThe House of Mirth,\u201d \u201cThe Custom of the Country\u201d and other probing stories of New York society was living in Paris at the time and soon set out to help those imperiled by the clash between Allied and German forces. She set up a workroom for seamstresses and others who had lost their jobs, established hostels that aided thousands of refugees and even reported from the trenches for a series of dispatches that ran in the American periodical Scribner’s Magazine.<\/p>\n But Wharton eventually \u2014 and inevitably \u2014 channeled her observations and experiences into fiction. She worked on a novel published after the war, \u201cA Son at the Front,\u201d and attempted a story about an affluent couple in the French countryside who decide that the war is going well enough that they can resume the social gatherings of the past. \u201cThe Men Who Saved the World\u201d \u2014 unfinished and never before published \u2014 appears Friday in the new issue of The Strand Magazine, which has released rare works by Mark Twain<\/a>, Ernest Hemingway<\/a> and many others.<\/p>\n \u201cThe boom of guns can be heard in the distance. A few young soldiers sit among the guests. And the hostess wants to know whether they might have dancing,\u201d Strand Managing Editor Andrew Gulli writes in a brief introduction. \u201cWharton asks a question that is as relevant today as it was over a century ago: what is the cost of refusing to see the horrors beyond the softly curtained windows \u2014 and who pays it?\u201d<\/p>\n Wharton had long scrutinized the rich from the inside. Born into a wealthy New York City family in 1862, she knew firsthand the manners and codes and traditions that she picked apart in her best known work. In \u201cThe Men Who Saved the World,\u201d believed to be written in 1918, she shifts the narrative from the New York drawing rooms of her early fiction to a French chateau within miles of a battlefield.<\/p>\n The author had a deep affinity for France and French culture, which she regarded as \u201cone of the greatest cultures in the world, perhaps the greatest culture,\u201d Wharton scholar Julie Olin-Ammentorp wrote in an email, adding that she was unsure why the author never finished \u201cThe Men Who Saved the World.\u201d The German attack stirred Wharton’s conscience, and her imagination.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Men Who Saved the World\u201d dramatizes the separation between civilian and military life, and what happens when they merge. It’s told through the perspective of a young American nurse, Milly Arden, a guest at the home of Fred and Madge Upshall, who are preparing a dinner party in the same setting where they had once permitted an army surgeon to perform amputations. Arden finds herself seated next to a war hero, Capt. Sherman Wake, regarded by Mrs. Upshall as one of the \u201creal people.\u201d Capt. Wake proves eager to discuss the \u201ccatastrophic horror and waste\u201d he has seen nearby.<\/p>\n \u201cYou hear the guns pretty distinctly here,\u201d Wake tells Arden. “They must make the windows rattle when everything\u2019s quiet, don\u2019t they?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, they do,\u201d she responded, looking out on an orchid \u201cwhich the cannonade had displaced just before dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.voiceofalexandria.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 When World War I broke out in 1914, Edith Wharton’s initial response was less as a storyteller in search of material than as a citizen and intrepid witness. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of \u201cThe House of Mirth,\u201d \u201cThe Custom of the Country\u201d and other probing stories of New York society was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2445858,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[309367,22367,480176,21741,380207,21791,30188,410929,22814],"class_list":["post-2445857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-books-and-literature","tag-celebrity","tag-edith-wharton-new-short-story-wwi","tag-entertainment","tag-fiction","tag-general-news","tag-u-s-news","tag-war-and-unrest","tag-world-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/A-rare-Edith-Wharton-story-is-unearthed-about-the-gap.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2445857"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2445859,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445857\/revisions\/2445859"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2445858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2445857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2445857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2445857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}