Best Selling Books by Edmund Wilson

The American Earthquake amply conveys the astonishing breadth of Edmund Wilson''s talent, provides an unparalleled vision of one of the most troubling periods in American history, and, perhaps inadvertently, offers a self-portrait comparable to The Education of Henry Adams. During a twelve-month period in 1930 and 1931, Edmund Wilson wrote a series of lengthy articles which he then collected in a book called American Jitters: A Year of the Slump. The resulting chronicle was hailed by the New York Times as "the best reporting that the period of depression has brought forth in the United States," and forms the heart of the present volume. In prose that is by turns dramatic and naturalistic, inflammatory and evocative, satirical and droll, Wilson painted an unforgettable portrait of a time when "the whole structure of American society seemed actually to be going to pieces." The American Earthquake bookends this chronicle with a collection of Wilson''s non-literary articles-including criticism, reportage, and some fiction-from the years of "The Follies," 1923-1928, and the dawn of the New Deal, 1932-1934. During this period, Wilson had grown from a little-known journalist to one of the most important American literary and social critics of the century.

A literary chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties from the brilliant mind of Edmund Wilson Shores of Light covers a vast range of authors including Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, Eugene O''Neill, e. e. cummings, Woodrow Wilson, H.L. Mencken, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Andre Malraux, Henry Miller, W.H. Auden, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

The Jazz Age through the eyes of a husband and wife, doing the nightclubs in 1920s New York. They are both wealthy and he is an aspiring composer. The author died before the manuscript was finished, nevertheless the book still provides a portrait.

In Edmund Wilson''s The Cold War and The Income Tax, the leading twentieth century critic writes about his protest against the Internal Revenue Service. Here, Wilson details his refusal to file income tax for nearly ten years and draws fascinating parallels between the Soviet Union and the Kafkaesque US tax system which, to Wilson''s dismay, supports a nuclear weapons arms race. "The truth is that the people of the United States are at the present time dominated and driven by two kinds of officially propagated fear: fear of the Soviet Union and fear of the income tax. These two terrors have been adjusted so as to complement one another and thus to keep the citizen of our free society under the strain of a double pressure from which he finds himself unable to escape -- like the man in the old Western story, who, chased into a narrow ravine by a buffalo, is confronted with a grizzly bear. If we fail to accept the tax, the Russian buffalo will butt and trample us, and if we try to defy the tax, the federal bear will crush us. The 60,000 officials who are appointed to check on us taxpayers are checked on, themselves, it seems, by another group of agents set to watch them. And supplementing these officials -- since private citizens are paid by the Internal Revenue Service to report on other people''s delinquencies, and their names of course are never revealed -- there is a whole host of amateur investigators. . . Does this kind of spying and delation differ much in its incitement to treachery from that which is encouraged in the Soviet Union?"

Edmund Wilson''s last collection of criticism, The Devils & Canon Barham, contains ten essays on Poets, Novelists, and Monsters Previously published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, Wilson''s writing featured in this volume sees the critic returning to his roots and youth, with essays on his childhood love for The Ingoldsby Legends, the works of Hemingway, Eliot''s The Waste Land, and ends with a piece on The Monsters of Bomarzo and by taking the Modern Language Association (MLA) to task.

Historical recollections of life in upstate New York from Edmund Wilson, one of America''s preeminent literary critics of the twentieth century. "What I have written . . . shows the gradual but steady expiration of the world of New York State as I knew it in my childhood and the modifications that its life has undergone. It is true that Lowville and Boonville have changed less—unless perhaps Charlottesville, Virginia—than any other part of this country that I knew when I was a child. But, as has been seen, it has reflected all the changes that, to a greater degree, have been taking place in the life of the country as a whole." - Edmund Wilson

These letters outline the mutual affection and closeness of the two writers, but also reveal the slow crescendo of mutual resentment, mistrust and rejection."--BOOK JACKET.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The author of To the Finland Station and Axel''s Castle brilliantly examines the significance of the scrolls'' discovery and their role in Jewish history with this insightful biblical study, Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls "Reading him, it is not difficult to imagine the ardor with which Edmund Wilson pursued his complex subject; it was the kind of subject he had always liked best, involving as it did history, politics, ancient lore, and all his faculties for imaginative reconstruction and historical analysis ... No book quite like this has been written in our century." —Leon Edel, from the introduction.

With a study of '' The Mohawks in high steel'' by Joseph Mitchell. First publ. 1949.