Edmund Beecher Wilson

Edmund Beecher Wilson 1856-1939, American zoologist, b. Geneva, Ill., grad. Yale (Ph.B., 1878), Johns Hopkins Univ. (Ph.D., 1881). He taught at Bryn Mawr (1885-91) and at Columbia (1891-1928), where he initiated research in genetics and attracted many followers. His principal work was on the function of the cell in heredity and on the role of the chromosomes (including the significance of the sex chromosome). He also studied embryology and experimental morphology. His works include The Cell in Development and Heredity (1896, 3d ed. 1925) and The Physical Basis of Life (1923).

Wilson, Edmund (1895–1972), American author. He served abroad during the First World War, an experience which inspired verse and short stories published in The Undertaker's Garland (1922, with J. P. Bishop). He published the novel I Thought of Daisy (1929, rev. 1967) and short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946). He is principally known for his influential, wide-ranging, and independent works of literary and social criticism, which include Axel's Castle (1931), a study of symbolist literature; The Triple Thinkers (1938); To the Finland Station (1940), a study of socialist theory; The Wound and the Bow (1941), a series of studies with a Freudian angle; and Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), a comprehensive survey of the period and the war's roots in the national psyche. His third wife was the novelist Mary McCarthy.