A Son at the Front is Edith Wharton's wartime novel examining patriotism, sacrifice, and divided loyalties during the First World War.
Set against the upheaval of Europe in 1914-1918, the novel follows John Campton, a young American artist living in France, and his father, a self-absorbed painter whose aesthetic detachment is tested by the moral demands of war. As John enlists in the French army, Wharton explores the emotional and philosophical tensions between personal ambition and public duty, between artistic individualism and national responsibility.
Unlike Wharton's society novels, A Son at the Front engages directly with the psychological strain of wartime Europe. Drawing on her own extensive humanitarian work in France during the conflict, Wharton portrays the war not as spectacle but as lived reality-its quiet anxieties, moral ambiguities, and intimate costs. The novel offers a restrained yet penetrating meditation on honor, identity, and the fragile bonds between parent and child in times of crisis.
This Wilder Publications edition presents the complete, unabridged 1923 text, restoring Wharton's powerful and often overlooked contribution to First World War literature.
". . . A Son at the Front is an extraordinarily poignant novel chronicling the effects of WWI on painter John Campton and his only child." -Publisher's Weekly
