"For much of the twentieth century, Americans had a love/hate relationship with France. While many admired its beauty, culture, refinement, and famed joie de vivre, others thought of it as a dilapidated country populated by foul-smelling, mean-spirited anti-Americans driven by a keen desire to part tourists from their money. This sequel to the widely praised Seductive Journey explores how both images came to flourish in the United States, often in the minds of the same people."

Biographer Lee gives us a new Edith Wharton--tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. She developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than as master. Wharton's life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: houses and gardens, relief efforts during the Great War, and the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her: unhappily married and childless, her one brush with passion came and went in midlife, an affair intimately recounted here. Lee interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age.--From publisher d

"J. Gresham Machen played a key role in the theological debates of the 1920s and 1930s. His work has been studied and evaluated from many angles. What is less well-known and less well considered is his service in the First World War. Although he objected to American involvement, he participated as a volunteer in the YMCA. From these rare letters the reader can see a fresh side of the great scholar. On the battle fields of France he was simply known as a compassionate soul who brought solace to scores of suffering soldiers. For those who only know Machen the polemicist, this volume will showcase Machen the caregiver" -- William Edgar, Professor of Apologetics, Westminster Theological Seminary.

"A Maine man, Sumner Waldron - Dr. Jack, as he was known - risked his life and the lives of his wife and teenage son to fight the injustices of Nazi Germany and to help downed Allied flyers escape to freedom. Doctor to the Resistance tells the story of the Jackson family's life in occupied Paris - how a wife and mother struggled with cold and near starvation in the terrible winters of 1941-44; how Dr. Jackson managed against the odds to keep the venerable American Hospital free of Nazi control; and how the Jackson family survived amid the intrigue and terror of underground work and resistance to the Nazis." "Young Phillip Jackson thought it was all "a great game." But the game turns tragically serious as Vichy secret police, who routinely executed resistance fighters, track the family's covert activities and close in on the Jacksons."

Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright began their careers as marginals within marginalized groups, and their desire to live peacefully in unorthodox marriages led them away from America and into permanent exile in France. Still, the obvious differences between them - in class, ethnic and racial origins, and in artistic expression - beg the question: What was there to talk about? This question opens a window onto each writer's meditations on the influence of racial, ethnic, and national origins on the formation of identity in a modern and post-modern world.