Edith Wharton is most popularly known as a novelist, but she
has also written many memoirs, poems and travel writings. At the beginning of
World War 1, Wharton was one of the few foreigners allowed to travel along the
front lines, mostly because of her connections with Walter Berry, the president
of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris at the time. She got to witness firsthand
the transformation of Paris and France as a whole as war slowly took over the
lives of soldiers and civilians while visiting hospitals, trenches, and
abandoned villages. She recorded her day to day travels in a series of articles
that were first published in Scribner’s Magazine, but later brought together
and published in 1918 in the book Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.
