Best Selling Books by Edmund Wilson

Regarded by many critics as Edmund Wilson''s greatest book, Patriotic Gore brilliantly portrays the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans.

In this classic work, “the greatest literary critic of the 20th century” probes the lives and works of seven great writers (New York Magazine). Combining biographical and critical sketches, Edmund Wilson searches for the wellspring of artistic genius in this series of seven essays. His wide-ranging subjects include Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jacques Casanova, and Sophocles. The first two studies, of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, reveal how in each case an unhappy childhood later resulted in mature artistic works. Expanding on this theme in succeeding chapters, Wilson captures the essence of his thesis in the mythical story of Philoctetes, as recounted in the final essay. The legendary Greek archer was bitten by snake and then afflicted with an incurable, malodorous wound that would not heal. After first being banished, the injured hero was later sought out by his fellow warriors for his prowess with a magic bow, and his skill was ultimately key to the Greek victory at Troy. “In the best tradition of literary criticism . . . combines exact information with shrewd and searching penetration into the personal life of the artist.” —The New York Times

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.

Hecate is the Greek goddess of sorcery, and Edmund Wilson''s Hecate County is the bewitched center of the American Dream, a sleepy bedroom community where drinks flow endlessly and sexual fantasies fill the air. Memoirs of Hecate County, Wilson''s favorite among his many books, is a set of interlinked stories combining the supernatural and the satirical, astute social observation and unusual personal detail. But the heart of the book, "The Princess with the Golden Hair," is a starkly realistic novella about New York City, its dance halls and speakeasies and slums. So sexually frank that for years Wilson''s book was suppressed, this story is one of the great lost works of twentieth-century American literature: an astringent, comic, ultimately devastating exploration of lust and love, how they do and do not overlap.

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

Edmund Wilson an American critic deals with the literatures of French and English Canada. Among the authors discussed are Morley Callaghan, Hugh MacLennan, John Buell, E. J. Pratt, Anne Hebert, Marie-Claire Blais, Roger Lemelin and Andre Laugevin.

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

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."

Edmund Wilson turned forty-five in 1940, and this volume shows the extent to which he was reappraising his life in the decade to follow--saying goodbye to the drifting of the 1920s and the Marxism of the 1930s. Book jacket.

"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

A gifted novelist, poet, playwright, and historian, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) served on the staffs of "Vanity Fair, The New Republic" and "The New Yorker", but is best known for the grace and insight of his literary criticism. Here in one volume is a representative selection from Wilson''s diverse oeuvre that offers readers the opportunity to partake of an incomparable intellectual feast.

A young man leaves his bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village to pursue the chorus girl he loves.

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

"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

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.

''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.

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.

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.

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.

"A selection of ... literary articles written during the nineteen forties."

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.

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.

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

An account of the discovery, origins and significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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.

Edmund Wilson''s personal and informative study on the plight of the Native American Indians, Apologies to the Iroquois As Wilson writes, “[In August 1975] I discovered in the New YorkTimes what seemed to me a very queer story. A band of Mohawk Indians, under the leadership of a chief called Standing Arrow, had moved in on some land on Schoharie Creek, a little river that flows into the Mohawk not far from Amsterdam, New York, and established a settlement there. Their claim was that the land they were occupying had been assigned them by the United States in a treaty of 1784. The Times ran a map of the tract which had at that time been recognized by our government as the territory of the Iroquois people, who included the Mohawks, the Senecas, the Onondagas, the Oneidas, the Cayugas and the Tuscaroras, and were known as the Six Nations. The tract was sixty miles wide, and it extended almost from Buffalo to Albany. "I had already known about this agreement as the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (now Rome, New York), which had first made it possible for white people to settle in upper New York State without danger of molestation by its original inhabitants; but I had not known what the terms of this treaty were, and I was surprised to discover that my property, acquired at the end of the eighteenth century by the family from which it had come to me, seemed to lie either inside or just outside the northern boundary. Having thus been brought to realize my ignorance of our local relations with the Indians and continuing to read in the papers of the insistence of Standing Arrow that the Mohawks had some legal right to the land on which they were camping, I paid a visit, in the middle of October, to their village on Schoharie Creek . . . .”

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 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."

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.