Best Selling Books by Edmund Wilson

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.

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

During a twelve-month period in 1930 and 1931, Edmund Wilson wrote a series of lengthy articles which he then collected in a book called American Jitters: A Year of the Slump. The resulting chronicle was hailed by the New York Times as "the best reporting that the period of depression has brought forth in the United States," and forms the heart of the present volume. In prose that is by turns dramatic and naturalistic, inflammatory and evocative, satirical and droll, Wilson painted an unforgettable portrait of a time when "the whole structure of American society seemed actually to be going to pieces." The American Earthquake bookends this chronicle with a collection of Wilson''s non-literary articles-including criticism, reportage, and some fiction-from the years of "The Follies," 1923-1928, and the dawn of the New Deal, 1932-1934. During this period, Wilson had grown from a little-known journalist to one of the most important American literary and social critics of the century. The American Earthquake amply conveys the astonishing breadth of Wilson''s talent, provides an unparalleled vision of one of the most troubling periods in American history, and, perhaps inadvertently, offers a self-portrait comparable to The Education of Henry Adams.

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.

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

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The last of Edmund Wilson''s posthumously published journals turned out to be one of his major books, The Sixties: the Last Journal, 1960–1972--a personal history that is also brilliant social comedy and an anatomy of the times. Wilson catches the flavor of an international elite -- Stravinsky, Auden, Andre Malraux, and Isaiah Berlin -- as well as the New York literati and the Kennedy White House, but he never strays too far from the common life, whether noting the routines of his normal neighbors or the struggle of his own aging. "Candor and intelligence come through on every page--in this always absorbing journal by perhaps the last great man of American letters." - Kirkus Reviews

Galley 121/121-A (1 sheet) of Edmund Wilson''s The shore''s of light. Galley 121-A reprints a February, 1928 letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald''s to Edmund Wilson. This galley was sent to Scottie Fitzgerald Smith to whom Wilson added a signed marginal holograph note.

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.

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.

Selections from: Classics and commercials and The shores of light.

Here Turgenev discusses the character of creative writing, the attitude of the artist to his environment, and the transmutation of the artist''s experience into a work of art. The best possible introduction to the author a reader could ask for. --New York Herald-Tribune.

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