Edmund Wilson A Life in Literature

From the Jazz Age through the Kennedy administration, Edmund Wilson (1895--1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. A champion of the young Ernest Hemingway, a loyal friend and mentor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and an ally of John Dos Passos during the Depression, Wilson wrote classics of literary and intellectual history (including Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and insightful criticism. Though he documented his private life in openly erotic fiction and journals, he left the personal dramas at its center in shadow. Lewis M. Dabney, the first writer to integrate Wilson's life and work, vividly encompasses his formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, his tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and his lasting accord with Elena Mumm Thornton, as well as his volatile friendship with Vladimir Nabokov and enduring ties with W. H. Auden and Isaiah Berlin. Steeped in knowledge of the era, this compelling narrative follows the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a lucid commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained -- in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity -- a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader. Edmund Wilson has been widely recognized as the authoritative biography of a brilliant man whose life reflected the grand sweep of twentieth-century cultural, social, and human experience.