Unseen Edith Wharton short story is published more than a century later

A never-before-published short story by Edith Wharton , the first female Pulitzer prize winner, who encapsulated the so-called gilded age of US society in bestselling novels including The Age of Innocence, received a first public airing on Friday. The Men Who Saved the World, discovered in the author’s archives at Yale University, appears in the Strand , a quarterly magazine that has previously turned up lost or previously unknown works by literary luminaries such as Raymond Chandler , Graham Greene and Tennessee Williams . The story, believed to have been written no earlier than July 1918, is a significant find for scholars and fans of Wharton’s works. It was spread across two corrected but undated typescripts, found “ incomplete and unpublished ” in the Edith Wharton Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Set during a dinner party in a French chateau towards the end of the first world war, it tells of the country’s wealthiest residents attempting to move on from the conflict that recently scarred them, even as guns are heard still booming and soldiers dying only miles away. The tale is punctuated by the meal being served on a grand dining room table that was used as an operating table for amputations only months before when the chateau was used as a field hospital. …