Edith Wharton, Translator

Edith Wharton played a far more important role than is usually recognized in the transformation of French perceptions of both American history and American literature in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In this article, I trace the different stages of that transformation. At first, in France, Wharton was hardly thought of as an American writer at all: she was merely a disciple of Balzac and Bourget who happened to be American. But by the early 1920s she began to be seen as the author of American novels, perhaps even the author of what she herself ironically called “the Great American Novel.”