Most Popular Books by Edmund Wilson

"Here for the first time in print is Wilson''s personal correspondence to his parents, lovers and wives, children, literary comrades, and friends from the different corners of his life. Various writers and thinkers - including Lionel Trilling, Cyril Connolly, and Isaiah Berlin - take their places alongside upstate New York neighbors in this gallery of letters that extends from the teens to the early 1970s. These letters complete the picture of Wilson the man, offering unguarded moments and flinty opinions that enrich our understanding of a complex and troubled personality. Four times married and many times in love; traveling through Depression America, the USSR, postwar Europe, the Middle East, and Haiti; and writing on a Balzacian scale, Wilson as a correspondent reveals the exhilaration and chaos of being himself.".

The preeminent award-winning literary critic of the era shares his dazzling observations of 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 Edmund Wilson, the slim young man in Greenwich Village sallying forth to parties in matching ties and socks, hobnobbing with such giant wordsmiths as 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.

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

The classic study of literature from the Civil War, featuring critical profiles of notable figures who captured its grim reality and profound meaning. In his introduction to Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson asks, "Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861–1865 in which so many people were so articulate?" Regarded by many as Wilson''s greatest book, Patriotic Gore more than proves the point, brilliantly portraying the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans. Figures discussed include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, among many others.

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.

The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965 collects Edmund Wilson''s masterful essays written during a fifteen year span. Originally published in leading periodicals like the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker , this collection features literary criticism, essays, and reviews by Wilson on F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken, Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, James Branch Cabell, Marquis de Sade, and more.

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."

An upper-middle-class intellectual narrates this classic collection of six stories exploring lust and love in mid-twentieth-century American society. "The devil has a field day in suburbia. The main scene of the story (when it is not Manhattan Island) is in the countryside somewhere on the commuters'' cocktail circuit near New York. Outwardly it is realistic down to the last croquet set. But it is also obviously named for Hecate, that three-headed goddess of black magic, nightmares and the underworld." — The New York Times 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 devastating 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. "I have read your book Memoirs of Hecate County in one swallow. There are lots of wonderful things in it." —Vladimir Baokov "There is a true whiff of hell in Hecate County—in the low ceilings and cheap underwear of the sex idyll, the clothes and neuroses of the copulators. . . . After 1946, Hecate Counties would spread and multiply and set the new cultural tone. The suburban home would replace the city street as the theater of hopes; private fulfillment and not public justice would set the pace of the pursuit of happiness. Wilson foretold it, casting his fiction in the coming mode, of sexual candor, dark sardonic fantasy, and confessional fragment." —John Updike

"A selection of ... literary articles written during the nineteen forties."

"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

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.

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

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.

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

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

"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