Wilson, Edmund

Wilson, Edmund (1895–1972), born in New Jersey, graduated from Princeton (1916), after service abroad during World War I began the writing career that made him a leading man of letters in various genres, best known as a literary critic. He long held several journalistic posts, including managing editor of Vanity Fair (1920–21), associate editor of The New Republic (1926–31), and book reviewer for The New Yorker (1944–48), but he always kept himself independent of organizations in pursuing his own varied interests that led to his many diverse books.

His works of nonfiction begin with Axel's Castle (1931), a study of Symbolist literature, and during the succeeding 16 years include The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (1932) and Travels in Two Democracies (1936), social reporting from a Marxist point of view, the latter concerning Russia and the U.S., combined in The American Earthquake (1958); The Triple Thinkers (1938, revised and enlarged 1948) and The Wound and the Bow (1941), essays on literature ranging from analyses of particular authors— Hemingway, James, Edith Wharton—to Freudian literary theory and the relationship of Marxism and historical interpretation to literature; To The Finland Station (1940), tracing European revolutionary traditions from Michelet to Lenin to Trotsky; The Boys in the Back Room (1941), notes on modern California authors; The Shock of Recognition (1943), an anthology of American writers' critical views of one another, from the mid‐19th century on; and Europe Without Baedeker (1947, revised 1966), travel sketches. From his journal publications during these years he collected Classics and Commercials (1950), articles and reviews about the 1940s; The Shores of Light (1952), a comparable anthology of his writings of the 1920s and 1930s; and The Bit Between My Teeth (1965), a similar literary chronicle of the 1950s and '60s. During the 1950s and 1960s he published The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955), revised and extended on new findings as The Dead Sea Scrolls, 1947–1969 (1969); Red, Black, Blond and Olive (1956), studies in four civilizations: Zuñi, Haitian, Russian, and Israeli; A Piece of My Mind (1956), “reflections at sixty” in the form of essays on diverse and important topics; Apologies to the Iroquois (1960), on the history and present status of the Indian Confederacy; Patriotic Gore (1962), substantial “studies in the literature of the American Civil War”; The Cold War and the Income Tax (1963), on his difficulties with, and objections to, federal taxation; and O Canada (1965), on Canadian culture. In the last year of his life and following his death there appeared A Window on Russia (1972), essays on Russian literature and language; The Devils and Canon Barham (1973), literary essays; and The Twenties (1975), from his notebooks of the time, a compilation completed by Leon Edel.

Wilson published his verse in The Undertaker's Garland (1922), a collaboration with John Peale Bishop; Poets, Farewell! (1929); Note‐Books of Night (1942), which, like the others, contains some prose; and Night Thoughts (1961), collecting from the two previous books. Wilson's fiction is printed in I Thought of Daisy (1929, revised 1967), a novel about bohemian literary New York, and Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), stories about the lives of wealthy New York suburban intelligentsia. His plays are Discordant Encounters (1926), dialogues and short dramas; This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches (1937), three “experimental” plays; The Little Blue Light (1950); Five Plays (1954), adding one work to the two previous books; and The Duke of Palermo (1969).

A Prelude (1967) draws on journals (1908–19) to portray his early life; Upstate (1971) contains recollections (1950–70) of his life in the family house of northern New York, where he summered. Correspondence is gathered in Letters on Literature and Politics (1977) and The Nabokov‐Wilson Letters (1979). The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960–1972 (1993) ends the day before his death.