Most Popular Books by Edmund Wilson

Regarded by many critics as Edmund Wilson''s greatest book, Patriotic Gore brilliantly portrays the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans.

One of the great works of modern historical writing, the classic account of the ideas, people, and politics that led to the Bolshevik Revolution Edmund Wilson''s To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin''s arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson''s own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea—that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom—gaining the power to change history. Vico, Michelet, Bakunin, and especially Marx—along with scores of other anarchists, socialists, nihilists, utopians, and more—all come to life in these pages. And in Wilson''s telling, their stories and their ideas remain as alive, as provocative, as relevant now as they were in their own time.

Published in 1931, Axel''s Castle was Edmund Wilson''s first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer."

Controversial upon publication in 1946, Memoirs of Hecate County remained banned for more than a decade before being reissued. A favorite among his own books, Edmund Wilson''s erotic and devestating portrait of the upper middle class still holds up today as a corrosive indictment of the adultery and intellectual posturing that lie at the heart of suburban America.

Contains primary source material.

Edmund Wilson''s Night Thoughts " contains an astonishing arrangement of prose and poetry composed by the author from the years 1917-1919. "[C]haracterized by [Wilson''s] spontaneity and wit. ... For Wilson followers, who are fondly familiar with his writing, this offers some delightful insights." - Kirkus Reviews on Night Thoughts

In this classic work, “the greatest literary critic of the 20th century” probes the lives and works of seven great writers (New York Magazine). Combining biographical and critical sketches, Edmund Wilson searches for the wellspring of artistic genius in this series of seven essays. His wide-ranging subjects include Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jacques Casanova, and Sophocles. The first two studies, of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, reveal how in each case an unhappy childhood later resulted in mature artistic works. Expanding on this theme in succeeding chapters, Wilson captures the essence of his thesis in the mythical story of Philoctetes, as recounted in the final essay. The legendary Greek archer was bitten by snake and then afflicted with an incurable, malodorous wound that would not heal. After first being banished, the injured hero was later sought out by his fellow warriors for his prowess with a magic bow, and his skill was ultimately key to the Greek victory at Troy. “In the best tradition of literary criticism . . . combines exact information with shrewd and searching penetration into the personal life of the artist.” —The New York Times

A young man leaves his bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village to pursue the chorus girl he loves.

"The selections show Wilson''s scholarship, the maturation of his keen, expressive voice and the emergence of his humanistic concerns... A feast for Wilson devotees". -- Publishers Weekly

Edmund Wilson''s The Fifties, edited by Leon Edel, is the highly acclaimed fourth volume in the series that began with The Twenties. It is complimented with photographs and journal excerpts of some of the most interesting characters of the decade, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, W.H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov. "A giant''s workroom we can wander through, marveling ..." - Richard Locke, The Wall Street Journal on The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period

A first part of a two-volume collection of essays by a forefront American critic and social chronicler includes pieces written during the 1920s and 1930s and includes Axel''s Castle, The Shores of Light, and an assortment of previously uncollected reviews.

A quarter century of intimate and intellectual correspondence between Nabokov and critic Edmund Wilson, prior to their notorious feud.

From one of America''s greatest literary critics comes Edmund Wilson''s insightful and candid record of the 1930''s, The Thirties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period. Here, continuing from Wilson''s previous journal, The Twenties, the narrator moves from the youthful concerns of the Jazz Age to his more substantial middle years, exploring the decade''s plunge from affluence and exploring the tenets of Communism. His personal life is also amply represented, from his marriage to Margaret Canby and her subsequent tragic death to various erotic episodes with unidentified women.

''Upstate'', Edmund Wilson''s history and memories of twenty years in the Old Stone Huse in Talcottville, New York, was perhaps his most warmly received book. It is an account of a region and its people, a social and personal history that seems sure to become a classic, worthy of the extraordinary praise it received.

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. The American Earthquake amply conveys the astonishing breadth of 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.

In these pages, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, the preeminent literary critic Edmund Wilson gives us perhaps the largest authentic document of the time, the dazzling observations of one of the principal actors in the American twenties. Here is the raw side of the U.S.A., the mad side of Hollywood, the literary infighting in New York, the gossip and anecdotes of an astonishing cast of characters, the jokes, the profundities, the inanities. Here is the slim young man in Greenwich Village sallying forth to parties in matching ties and socks. Here is F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Peale Bishop, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos and Eugene O''Neill.

"The friendship between Elizabeth Waugh and the influential literary critic and novelist Edmund Wilson developed in the early 1930s and lasted until Waugh''s death in 1944. Despite the cultural differences between them - Waugh as a self-educated and emotional visual artist and Wilson an analytical and learned critic with a historical bent - they developed a bond that was close if often troubled." "The present volume contains eighty-eight letters from Waugh to Wilson, plus several from him to her and to her mother after her death. Their correspondence - now at Yale University - is presented here with meticulously detailed annotation of persons and events referred to in the letters, providing a provocative look into the private thoughts of these two representative figures from the artistic and literary worlds of the later 1930s. These letters, read against the portrayal of the fictional Imogen Loomis, offer fascinating insights into the process of artistic creation in the novel; taken with the biographical Introduction and Afterword, they can shed light on many of the problems faced by literary and artistic women of the upper middle class during the depression era."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

From one of the leading literary critics of his generation comes the first of Edmund Wilson''s three novels, I thought of Daisy, published together with his short story "Galahad." Set in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, Edmund Wilson’s I Thought of Daisy tells the coming of age story of a young man living a bohemian life, and of his heartfelt relationship with a chorus girl he meets at a party. Fictional sketches drawn from real-life literary figures are scattered throughout, including John Dos Passos and Wilson''s lover, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Also included in this volume is Wilson''s short story "Galahad," about the sexual awakening of a young boy at prep school. "What needs to be [said] is how good, if ungainly, Daisy is, how charmingly and intelligently she tells of the speakeasy days of a Greenwich Village as red and cozy as a valentine, of lamplit islands where love and ambition and drunkenness bloomed all at once. The fiction writer in Wilson was real, and his displacement is a real loss." - John Updike

Edmund Wilson an American critic deals with the literatures of French and English Canada. Among the authors discussed are Morley Callaghan, Hugh MacLennan, John Buell, E. J. Pratt, Anne Hebert, Marie-Claire Blais, Roger Lemelin and Andre Laugevin.

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.

Edmund Wilson''s personal and informative study on the plight of the Native American Indians, Apologies to the Iroquois As Wilson writes, “[In August 1975] I discovered in the New YorkTimes what seemed to me a very queer story. A band of Mohawk Indians, under the leadership of a chief called Standing Arrow, had moved in on some land on Schoharie Creek, a little river that flows into the Mohawk not far from Amsterdam, New York, and established a settlement there. Their claim was that the land they were occupying had been assigned them by the United States in a treaty of 1784. The Times ran a map of the tract which had at that time been recognized by our government as the territory of the Iroquois people, who included the Mohawks, the Senecas, the Onondagas, the Oneidas, the Cayugas and the Tuscaroras, and were known as the Six Nations. The tract was sixty miles wide, and it extended almost from Buffalo to Albany. "I had already known about this agreement as the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (now Rome, New York), which had first made it possible for white people to settle in upper New York State without danger of molestation by its original inhabitants; but I had not known what the terms of this treaty were, and I was surprised to discover that my property, acquired at the end of the eighteenth century by the family from which it had come to me, seemed to lie either inside or just outside the northern boundary. Having thus been brought to realize my ignorance of our local relations with the Indians and continuing to read in the papers of the insistence of Standing Arrow that the Mohawks had some legal right to the land on which they were camping, I paid a visit, in the middle of October, to their village on Schoharie Creek . . . .”

Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson''s critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker. Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man of letters demonstrates Wilson''s supreme skills as both literary and cultural critic.

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.

The Duke of Palermo is a comedy about American academic life which is an integral part of Edmund Wilson''s work and will be enjoyed by the admirers of literary chronicles, as well as by those who know his fiction. Also included in this collection of plays is An Open Letter to Mike Nichols, which first appeared in the New York Review of Books.

A second volume of a two-part collection of essays and reviews by the literary critic features pieces from the 1930s and 1940s, including "The Triple Thinkers, " "The Wound and the Bow, " and "Classics and Commercials."

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.

Little Blue Light: A Play in Three Acts from the leading literary critic of his generation, Edmund Wilson The characters in Little Blue Light include an old-fashioned newspaperman who has become editor of a literary magazine and is making his last stand for liberalism; his brilliant, egoistic wife, who is at once intensely ambitious and dissatisfied with everything she gets; a neurotic returned expatriate, who has found out how to exploit his neurosis by writing; the editor''s twenty-six year-old secretary, who represents everything most admirable in the prep school and college tradition till he is subjected to the pressure of the contemporary world; and a mysterious moralizing gardener of indeterminate nationality. This horrifying satirical play is a study of American types and a comment on social tendencies. It has something of the author''s Memoirs of Hecate County, something of the late George Orwell''s 1984, and something of Charles Addams''s New Yorker cartoons

First English translation of the literary memoirs of the great Russian novelist. Includes an essay on Turgenev by Edmund Wilson.