Most Popular Books by Edmund Wilson

From the author of To the Finland Station comes a deeply personal and incisive memoir, A Piece of My Mind. Edmund Wilson, often considered to be the greatest American literary critic of the twentieth century, reflects back on life in his sixth decade with this insightful intellectual autobiography that covers topics ranging from Religion, War, the USA, Europe, Russia, Jews, Education, Science, Sex, and much more, all examined with his characteristic wit and intelligence.

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.

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?"

A Window on Russia is a collection of Edmund Wilson''s papers on Russian writers and the Russian language (which he taught himself to read), written between 1943 and 1971. Writers discussed include Pushkin, Gogol, Chekov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, among others. "In A Window on Russia, which Wilson modestly calls ''a handful of disconnected pieces, written at various times when I happened to be interested in the various authors,'' we encounter that rare pleasure of entering a living world where the dead hand of academia never casts its shadow." - Kirkus Reviews

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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 first edition of Engines of Discovery celebrated in words, images and anecdotes the accelerators and their constructors that culminated in the discovery of the Higgs boson. But even before the Higgs was discovered, before the champagne corks popped and while the television producers brushed up their quantum mechanics, a new wave of enthusiasm for accelerators to be applied for more practical purposes was gaining momentum. Almost all fields of human endeavour will be enhanced by this trend: energy conservation, medical diagnostics and treatment, national security, as well as industrial processing. Accelerators have been used most spectacularly to reveal the structure of the complex molecules that determine our metabolism and life. For every accelerator chasing the Higgs, there are now ten thousand serving other purposes. It is high time to move from abstract mathematics and philosophy to the practical needs of humankind.It is the aim of this revised and expanded edition to describe this revolution in a manner which will attract the young, not only to apply their curiosity to the building blocks of matter but to help them contribute to the improvement of the quality of life itself on this planet. As always, the authors have tried to avoid lengthy mathematical description. In describing a field which reaches out to almost all of today''s cutting edge technology, some detailed explanation cannot be avoided but this has been confined to sidebars. References guide experts to move on to the journal Reviews of Accelerator Science and Technology and other publications for more information. But first we would urge every young physicist, teacher, journalist and politician to read this book.

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.

From the author of To the Finland Station and The Triple Thinkers comes a collection of five extraordinary plays. Collected together in one volume, these selected plays by Edmund Wilson includes such works as Cyprian''s Prayer, The Crime in the Whispering Room, This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches, Beppo and Beth, and The Little Blue Light.

''The American Earthquake'' bookends ''American Jitters: A Year of the Slump'', a previous Wilson effort. It features 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.

Recounts the adventures of a nine-year-old Jewish girl and her family in the early 1930''s as they travel from Germany to England.

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Here Turgenev discusses the character of creative writing, the attitude of the artist to his environment, and the transmutation of the artist''s experience into a work of art. The best possible introduction to the author a reader could ask for. --New York Herald-Tribune.