Coming Home: 1916

By Edith Wharton

In 1921, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, earning the award for The Age of Innocence. But Wharton also wrote several other novels, as well as poems and short stories that made her not only famous but popular among her contemporaries. That included her good friend Henry James, and she counted among her acquaintances Teddy Roosevelt and Sinclair Lewis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Krill Press
• Release date: Jan 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781518372162

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

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COMING HOME: 1916

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Edith Wharton

PITHY PRESS

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Copyright © 2016 by Edith Wharton

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Coming Home: 1916

By

Edith Wharton

Coming Home: 1916

Published by Pithy Press

New York City, NY

First published circa 1937

Copyright © Pithy Press, 2015

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

About PITHY Press

Edgar Allan Poe once advised would-be writers to never waste a word, and indeed, some of literature’s greatest works are some of the shortest. Pithy Press publishes the greatest short stories ever written, from the realism of Anton Chekhov to the humor of O. Henry.

I

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THE YOUNG MEN OF OUR American Relief Corps are beginning to come back from the front with stories.

There was no time to pick them up during the first months—the whole business was too wild and grim. The horror has not decreased, but nerves and sight are beginning to be disciplined to it. In the earlier days, moreover, such fragments of experience as one got were torn from their setting like bits of flesh scattered by shrapnel. Now things that seemed disjointed are beginning to link themselves together, and the broken bones of history are rising from the battle-fields.

I can’t say that, in this respect, all the members of the Relief Corps have made the most of their opportunity. Some are unobservant, or perhaps simply inarticulate; others, when going beyond the bald statistics of their job, tend to drop into sentiment and cinema scenes; and none but H. Macy Greer has the gift of making the thing told seem as true as if one had seen it. So it is on H. Macy Greer that I depend, and when his motor dashes him back to Paris for supplies I never fail to hunt him down and coax him to my rooms for dinner and a long cigar.

Greer is a small hard-muscled youth, with pleasant manners, a sallow face, straight hemp-coloured hair and grey eyes of unexpected inwardness. He has a voice like thick soup, and speaks with the slovenly drawl of the new generation of Americans, dragging his words along like reluctant dogs on a string, and depriving his narrative of every shade of expression that intelligent intonation gives. But his eyes see so much that they make one see even what his foggy voice obscures.

Some of his tales are dark and dreadful, some are unutterably sad, and some end in a huge laugh of irony. I am not sure how I ought to classify the one I have written down here.

II

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ON MY FIRST DASH TO the Northern fighting line—Greer told me the other night—I carried supplies to an ambulance where the surgeon asked me to have a talk with an officer who was badly wounded and fretting for news of his people in the east of