Edmund Wilson was the dominant American literary
critic from the 1920s until his death in 1972, but he
was also far more than that: a chronicler of his times,
a historian of ideas, a probing observer of himself and
of the society around him. With this volume and a
companion volume devoted to the 30s and 40s--the first
two entries in what will be a series devoted to Wilson's
work--The Library of America pays tribute to the writer
who first conceived the idea of a publishing series
dedicated to "bringing out in a complete and compact
form the principal American classics." "Literary Essays
and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s" gives us Wilson at the
midpoint of his extraordinary career as critic and
scholar, and includes in complete form three of his most
significant books. "The Triple Thinkers" (1938, revised
1948) and "The Wound and the Bow" (1941) give us Wilson
at the height of his powers, in a series of extended
literary studies marked by his unique combination of
criticism, biographical narrative, and psychological
analysis. Here are his dazzling portraits of Pushkin and
Flaubert, Dickens and Henry James, Kipling and Casanova,
equally sensitive to historical context and his
subjects' inner lives; his scintillating reader's guide
to the mysteries of Finnegans Wake and his celebrated
exploration of the nature of creativity through the
figure of Sophocles' wounded hero Philoctetes. "Classics
and Commercials" (1950) is Wilson's gathering of the
best of his reviews from the 1940s, a collection that
exemplifies the range and omnivorousness of his
interests. In the exact and fluent prose that makes him
an unfailing delight to read, Wilson takes on everything
from Gogol and Tolstoy to contemporaries like James M.
Cain, Katherine Anne Porter, Dorothy Parker, and William
Faulkner. Whether registering his qualms about detective
novels, parsing the etiquette manuals of Emily Post, or
paying tribute to the comic genius of Evelyn Waugh,
Wilson turns any critical occasion into the highest kind
of pleasure. The volume is completed with a selection of
uncollected reviews from this period, including Wilson's
observations on the work of William Maxwell, Saul
Bellow, and Anais Nin. |
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