A Son at the Front
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
An artist watches his son go to the frontlines of WWI in this novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth.
Paris, 1914. An American painter living abroad, John Campton is excited to spend a month traveling with his son George. But their plans are cut short when war breaks out across Europe. Raised by his mother in the United States, George is American through-and-through. But he is technically a French citizen—and now he is called upon to fight for France. As John reconnects with his ex-wife in an attempt to keep George from the front, George makes a shocking decision that leaves John struggling to understand his role—as both an artist and a parent—in a time of war.
Written in 1923, Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front offers heartbreaking drama as well as biting satire in its knowing depiction of life behind the frontlines of World War I.
“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 Weekly
This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 regiment--to 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, 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 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.
