Edith Wharton is most popularly known as an American
novelist, though she has also written many memoirs, poems, and travel writings.
Wharton was living in France when World War 1 began and decided to put all she
could into the war effort. Because of her exclusive connections to Walter
Berry, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris, she was one
of the few foreigners permitted to travel along the front lines to witness
firsthand the transformation of Paris and France as war slowly took over the
lives of soldiers and civilians. While visiting hospitals, trenches, and
abandoned villages, Wharton experienced not only her own personal ethical
dilemmas, but also those of soldiers, nurses and civilians, and recorded these
experiences into a series of articles first published in the American
periodical Scribner’s Magazine, and later brought together in 1918 to be bound
into the book Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.
