Edmund Wilson
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- This article is about the literary critic. For the geneticist, see Edmund Beecher Wilson.
Early life
Edmund Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and educated first at The Hill School and then at Princeton. He began his writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun, and served in the army during the First World War. He was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920 and 1921, and later served on the staffs of The New Republic and The New Yorker.
Early major works
Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931) was a sweeping survey of Symbolism and Arthur Rimbaud, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (author of Axel), W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Wilson was interested in modern culture as a whole, and many of his writings go beyond the realm of pure literary criticism.
In his landmark book To the Finland Station, Wilson studied the course of European socialism, from the 1824 discovery by Jules Michelet of Vico culminating in the 1917 arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station of Saint Petersburg to lead the Bolshevik Revolution.
Wilson's early works are heavily influenced by the ideas of Freud and Marx, reflecting his deep interest in their work.
Context and relationships
Wilson's critical works helped foster public appreciation for U.S. novelists Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Nabokov.
Edmund Wilson was a close friend of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and edited his final book for posthumous publication, and also a friend of Vladimir Nabokov, with whom he corresponded extensively and whose writing he introduced to Western audiences; however, their friendship was damaged by Wilson's cool reaction to Nabokov's Lolita and by a dispute over Wilson's criticism of Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
Edmund Wilson was often rather indifferent to the pain that his vigorous criticism might bring to others. This was only a minor problem in his role as a literary critic, but in personal relationships it was more costly.
Wilson's second wife (1938-46) was Mary McCarthy, who was also well-known for her literary criticism. She admired enormously Wilson's breadth of reading and depth of intellect, and they co-operated on numerous works.
Cold War times
Wilson was also an outspoken critic of U.S. Cold War policies. He did not pay his income tax from 1946 to 1955 and was later investigated by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). He also failed to pay state income taxes, which had little to do with the Cold War.
After a settlement, Wilson received a $25,000 fine rather than the original $69,000, perhaps due to his political connections to the Kennedy administration. He received no jail time. In his book (1963), Wilson argued that, as a result of competitive militarization against the Soviet Union, the civil liberties of Americans were being paradoxically infringed under the guise of defense from Communism. For these reasons, Wilson also opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War.
Works (selected)
- , New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931.
- To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1940.
- The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1941.
- Memoirs of Hecate County, Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1946.
- The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948.
- Red, Black, Blond and Olive, London: W. H. Allen, 1956.
- Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Co, 1950.
- The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, Fontana Books, 1955.
- A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty,New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956.
- Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962.
- The Cold War and the Income Tax: A protest, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1964.
- Europe without Baedeker: Sketches among the Ruins of Italy, Greece and England, with Notes from a European Diary: 1963-1964, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967.
- The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
- Apologies to the Iroquois, New York, NY: Vintage, 1960.
- The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953.
- The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958.
- The Twenties
- The Thirties
- The Forties
- The Fifties
- The Sixties: The Last Journal 1960-1972, New York, NY: The Noonday Press, 1993.
- editor, The Shock of Recognition, New York, NY: Modern Library, 1943.
External links
- [Missionary: Edmund Wilson and American culture] by Louis Menand New Yorker 8 August 2005
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