A Son at the Front

Edith Wharton's eleventh novel, A Son at the Front (1923), is set during World War I. When George Campton, an American painter, is sent to war as a French soldier, the jumbled liaisons of his familial ties are severed. This is a powerful classic of American literature, a feverish and poignant character study. Edith Wharton's eleventh novel. "Campton looked at this date with a gaze of unmixed satisfaction. His son, his only boy, who was coming from America, must have landed in England that morning, and after a brief halt in London would join him the next evening in Paris. To bring the moment nearer, Campton, smiling at his weakness, tore off the leaf and uncovered the 31. Then, leaning in the window, he looked out over his untidy scrapof garden at the silver-grey sea of Paris spreading mistily below him. A number of visitors had passed through the studio that day. After years of obscurity Campton had been projected into the light — or perhaps only into the lime light — by his portrait of his son George, exhibited three years earlier at the spring show of the French Society of Painters and Sculptors. The picture seemed to its author to be exactly in the line of the unnoticed things he had been showing before, though perhaps nearer to what he was always trying for, because of the exceptional interest of his subject. But to the public he had appeared to take a new turn; or perhaps some critic had suddenly found the right phrase for him; or, that season, people wanted a new painter to talk about."