Old New York : False dawn (The ‘Forties)

Description

A merchant of the 1840s sends his son to Italy with money and a list: bring back the great names. The son meets Ruskin, learns to see, and comes home with early Italian paintings that his father finds worthless and his city finds ridiculous. He is right by fifty years and ruined by it.False Dawn is the first of the four Old New York novellas, published in 1924, in which Wharton went back to the city of her childhood one decade at a time. It is her most compact statement of the thing she wrote about all her life: what a closed society does to the person who sees further than it does. Decorations by E. C. Caswell.This is a faithful print-on-demand facsimile of the 1924 New York edition, reproduced in full from a library copy. The historical text is reproduced without modification; only the format, margins and legibility have been reset for modern printing.