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The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War.

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From: Contemporary Review
Date: 19970901
Author:Bridgman, Joan

This book shines a light on an unrepresentative part of Edith Wharton's life, the period during the First World War. This wealthy New York Socialite, a cultured representative of the American literati with an established reputation as a novelist, became desperately concerned with the war and threw herself into propaganda efforts to persuade the American public that their country should enter the fray. She saw Germany as imposing a master culture that posed a threat, an assault on everything she believed in. The war would mean the end of the age of innocence. As Andre Gide put it in ...

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