iROC: Humanitarian, War Correspondent (and Great American Novelist): Edith Wharton and World War I

Please join us Thursday, November 4th, at 12:45 p.m. when Dr. Nancy Von Rosk, Professor of English in the MSMC Division of Arts and Letters, will present Humanitarian, War Correspondent (and Great American Novelist): Edith Wharton and World War I.

For many scholars of American Literature, Edith Wharton is the “Grande Dame” of American letters. Celebrated for her wit, polished literary style, and psychologically complex characters, Wharton is renowned for her satires of Old New York’s high society as well as her tragic tales of poverty and thwarted lives. The first woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize as well as an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, Wharton’s achievements were remarkable for a woman of her time, yet this is only one part of her legacy. Dr. Von Rosk will take us beyond “The Age of Innocence” to discuss Wharton’s humanitarian work during the first World War as well as the range of writing she produced during the war. 

Dr. Von Rosk has been studying, teaching, and writing on Edith Wharton since she was a grad student.  For her spring sabbatical in 2020, she had planned to visit the archives at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library which were still yielding surprises and making news in the NY Times and The New Yorker with headlines like "Lost Edith Wharton play emerges from Scholarly Sleuthing." Dr. Von Rosk also had a proposal accepted for the Edith Wharton conference that June celebrating Wharton’s New York and planned a visit to France, Wharton's adoptive country. Unfortunately, those plans had to be revised. Dr. Von Rosk made use of this time, saying “The conference was canceled, the libraries were shut to researchers and I spent much of that spring sabbatical at my dining room table, immersing myself in an aspect of Wharton’s work and life that had always intrigued me, but I never seemed to have the time to investigate further. This was the project that sustained me through the strangeness and uncertainty of our first COVID-19 semester.”

Nancy Von Rosk is a Professor of English and teaches a range of courses at the Mount including the American Literature Survey, Forms of Literature, Women Writers, The Jazz Age, Foundations of Literary Studies and a Senior Capstone Seminar on the Gothic. She has edited a book on the Jazz Age and her publications on Edith Wharton, and other American writers including Leslie Silko, Willa Cather, Mark Twain, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman have appeared in essay collections and the journals Studies in the Novel, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of the Short Story in English, Southwestern American Literature, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, and Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies.