Unpublished Edith Wharton Short Story Appears in Print for First Time

The Strand Magazine features a rare and previously unpublished Edith Wharton wartime story The Men Who Saved the World in its latest issue.

"The story has a striking, very Wharton-like contrast at its center," said Andrew F. Gulli, Managing Editor of Strand, "a formal dinner party resumes with orchids, candles, and polite conversation, even as the guns can still be heard in the distance and at the same table where, earlier in the war, an army surgeon had performed amputations.

"It’s a fascinating piece of literary history, but it also feels unnervingly timely. Wharton is writing about war, distance, privilege, denial, and the human instinct to restore normalcy while catastrophe is still unfolding nearby."

The story, probably written no earlier that July 1918, was discovered in the author’s archives at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as two corrected but undated typescripts.

The story appears in the new issue of The Strand Magazine which has previously published rare or unpublished works by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, H.G. Wells, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Tennessee Williams, Louisa May Alcott, and Shirley Jackson.