As is well known, Edith Wharton put her tireless energies to work for her adopted country of France during World War I (1914-1918), founding and running charities, organizing her wealthy friends to support her efforts, and writing essays from the front that were published in Scribner’s Magazine and later collected as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belport [misprint for Belfort] (1915). For this service, she was later awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.

Wharton’s biographers (R. W. B. Lewis, Shari Benstock, Hermione Lee) have written about Wharton’s war efforts; for more specific information see Alan Price’s The End of the Age of Innocence, Julie Olin-Ammentorp’s Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War, and Alice Kelly’s recent edition of Fighting France.

The Book of the Homeless was organized and edited by Wharton to raise money for the American Hostels for Refugees. For Veterans’ Day, here are a few pictures from that volume. It’s a veritable Who’s Who of artists (Bakst, Blanch, Monet, Renoir, Rodin, Sargent, etc.), musicians and performers (Stravinsky, Sarah Bernhardt), and writers (Cocteau, John Galsworthy, Rupert Brooke, Thomas Hardy, W. D. Howells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Theodore Roosevelt, and of course Wharton herself).

These pictures are from my copy of The Book of the Homeless, but you can see the entire volume at https://archive.org/details/bookofhomeless00wharuoft.