ABSTRACT
In 1907, the Atlantic Monthly celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an issue devoted to assuring its own place in literary history. The year of the Atlantic’s fiftieth anniversary, Edith Wharton rented the George Vanderbilts’ apartment in Paris, where she began a friendship with the professional charmer and journalist, William Morton Fullerton. Wharton’s history with the Atlantic went back to the time that her mother sent a handful of her poems to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who showed them to his editor, W. D. Howells. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton does more than chronicle the battle between the masses and the classes, in which the Moffatts rise triumphant if discontented with their bargains. Wharton’s novel is about dialogue and the collaborative making of reality. Something changed in Wharton’s thinking between her idyll through French country side in A Motor-Flight through France and the publication of The Custom of the Country, which pessimistically assembles the factors and forces that wrought war.
