In Morocco

What happens when one of American literature's most acute observers of social detail travels to a world utterly unlike her own? In 1917, as Europe burned, Edith Wharton journeyed to Morocco, a country most Westerners knew only as a name whispered with exotic intrigue. Yet she went beyond the familiar Foreigner zones of Tangier into the interior, becoming one of the first Western women to do so. The result is not merely a travelogue but a record of a world about to change: the architecture, the souks, the deserts, the faces of people living by rhythms untouched by war. Wharton brings the same ruthless precision she applied to Gilded Age Newport and New York to a place where every detail is strange. Written during the chaos of World War I, there's an underlying current of impermanence, what she witnesses will not last. This is travel writing at its most transporting: a document of a specific moment in a specific place, written by someone who saw everything.