New Releases by Edmund Wilson

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.

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."

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 Duke of Palermo is a comedy about American academic life which is an integral part of Edmund Wilson''s work and will be enjoyed by the admirers of literary chronicles, as well as by those who know his fiction. Also included in this collection of plays is An Open Letter to Mike Nichols, which first appeared in the New York Review of Books.

Edmund Wilson''s last collection of criticism, The Devils & Canon Barham, contains ten essays on Poets, Novelists, and Monsters Previously published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, Wilson''s writing featured in this volume sees the critic returning to his roots and youth, with essays on his childhood love for The Ingoldsby Legends, the works of Hemingway, Eliot''s The Waste Land, and ends with a piece on The Monsters of Bomarzo and by taking the Modern Language Association (MLA) to task.

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?"

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 devestating 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.

In these pages, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, the preeminent literary critic Edmund Wilson gives us perhaps the largest authentic document of the time, the dazzling observations of one of the principal actors in 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 the slim young man in Greenwich Village sallying forth to parties in matching ties and socks. Here is 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.

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.

Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson''s critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker. Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man of letters demonstrates Wilson''s supreme skills as both literary and cultural critic.

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.

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

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

Little Blue Light: A Play in Three Acts from the leading literary critic of his generation, Edmund Wilson The characters in Little Blue Light include an old-fashioned newspaperman who has become editor of a literary magazine and is making his last stand for liberalism; his brilliant, egoistic wife, who is at once intensely ambitious and dissatisfied with everything she gets; a neurotic returned expatriate, who has found out how to exploit his neurosis by writing; the editor''s twenty-six year-old secretary, who represents everything most admirable in the prep school and college tradition till he is subjected to the pressure of the contemporary world; and a mysterious moralizing gardener of indeterminate nationality. This horrifying satirical play is a study of American types and a comment on social tendencies. It has something of the author''s Memoirs of Hecate County, something of the late George Orwell''s 1984, and something of Charles Addams''s New Yorker cartoons

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.

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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.

A second volume of a two-part collection of essays and reviews by the literary critic features pieces from the 1930s and 1940s, including "The Triple Thinkers, " "The Wound and the Bow, " and "Classics and Commercials."

These letters outline the mutual affection and closeness of the two writers, but also reveal the slow crescendo of mutual resentment, mistrust and rejection."--BOOK JACKET.

"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

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.

The Jazz Age through the eyes of a husband and wife, doing the nightclubs in 1920s New York. They are both wealthy and he is an aspiring composer. The author died before the manuscript was finished, nevertheless the book still provides a portrait.

"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

Bonded Leather binding

''Upstate'', Edmund Wilson''s history and memories of twenty years in the Old Stone Huse in Talcottville, New York, was perhaps his most warmly received book. It is an account of a region and its people, a social and personal history that seems sure to become a classic, worthy of the extraordinary praise it received.

Edmund Wilson''s The Fifties, edited by Leon Edel, is the highly acclaimed fourth volume in the series that began with The Twenties. It is complimented with photographs and journal excerpts of some of the most interesting characters of the decade, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, W.H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov. "A giant''s workroom we can wander through, marveling ..." - Richard Locke, The Wall Street Journal on The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period

Contains primary source material.

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