In a never publicly released story by Edith Wharton, a dinner party goes on in a French chateau during the summer of 1918 as World War I nears its end and while the booms of guns can be heard in the distance.
“The Men Who Saved the World,” a previously unreleased fictional short story by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, appeared posthumously on Friday in The Strand Magazine, a quarterly publication.
The work illustrates the tension between a return to decorum and the final gasps of the war.
The story, believed to have been written no earlier than July 1918, was ultimately abandoned by Wharton and had been held in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.
The story, on two typed and undated manuscripts that appeared to be different drafts, centers on a dinner party hosted at the same table where, earlier in the war, an army surgeon had performed amputations.
Orchids need to be rearranged as they are shaken by the vibrations from blasts.
“Out there, at that very hour, men were falling by thousands to make the world safe — for this!” one passage reads. “And some of the young officers at whose delay their host was beginning to chafe were coming straight in from those scenes.”
About a century later, the story’s themes still resonate, said Andrew Gulli, the managing editor of The Strand, which is based in Royal Oak, Mich.
“You’ll read about a war happening overseas, but I’ve never felt touched by it myself,” he said. “I’ve just watched it on television.”
Her writing depicts “something that’s universal, whereby people can witness war from far away, but they cannot really feel the effects of it,” he added.
Wharton, whose works include “The Age of Innocence,” “Ethan Frome” and “The House of Mirth,” was raised among the New York City elite of the late 1800s and early 1900s and often incorporated themes of the aristocracy in her writings.
She was in Paris during World War I and devoted herself to relief efforts, including organizing housing for refugees and opening a tuberculosis hospital.
In 1916, she received the French Legion of Honor for her work during the war.
“The Men Who Saved the World” had been analyzed in 2023 by Isabelle Parsons, an English literature professor at the Open University in England.
But Mr. Gulli said that he could not find any instance of it being available to the public before appearing in The Strand.
In 2016, a play by Wharton, “The Shadow of a Doubt,” was discovered by scholars, and later appeared onstage.
The Strand is the spiritual successor of the British publication by the same name, Mr. Gulli said. Its current iteration began to run in 1998, and has printed previously unreleased stories by celebrated authors, including Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway.
Mr. Gulli said that Wharton had been on his list of writers to research, and he received a number of materials from the Beinecke library that he pored over for months, looking to uncover new material.
Many of the other materials were handwritten and could be difficult to decipher, Mr. Gulli said.
“We would need probably handwriting experts who work for the F.B.I. to try to come up with what she was writing,” he said.
Around February, he came across “The Men Who Saved the World.”
“I read a reference that it was not published before, and I looked at this and I said, ‘OK, now this one is the most timely work, and it’s a work where there won’t be this debate about whether there was a comma or a question mark.’”
Although the short story was incomplete, its narrative and thematic elements are cohesive.
“I didn’t know where else she would go with the story than where she went with it,” Mr. Gulli said. “It’s leaving me satisfied. It’s not leaving me with that feeling where I want to find out any more.”
Emmett Lindner is a business reporter for The Times.
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