Edmund Wilson: A Life In Literature - Hardcover

Dabney, Lewis M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374113122 ISBN 13: 9780374113124

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history (Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and criticism that has outlasted many of its subjects. Wilson documented his unruly private life--a formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, a tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and volatile friendships with Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, among others--in openly erotic fiction and journals, but Lewis Dabney is the first writer to integrate the life and work.

Dabney traces the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a deep commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Along the way, 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 will be recognized as the lasting biography of this brilliant man whose life reflected so much of the cultural, social, and human experience of a turbulent century.

About this title

Review:

This thorough biography gives the definitive treatment to the life and work of one of the early twentieth century's most highly revered men of letters.

(Library Journal (starred review))

There are echoes of Wilson's infectious curiosity and sky-high standards in the eloquently paced, beautifully considered prose of this masterful biography. The quicksilver movement of Dabney's sentences is propelled by deep, complex ideas.

(Harper's Magazine)

Dabney, a veteran Wilson scholar... is an academic who knows how to write. The result is a book that will seize any passionate reader of literature by the throat.

(The New Criterion)

Fascinating, admirably ample, intelligent, and balanced... Dabney knows his subject cold, and he has drawn a realistic, poignant portrait of Wilson that conveys the personal experiences feeding the work, and vice versa.

(Bookforum)

An outsize biography that doesn't stint in chronicling the intimate and often stormy aspects of [Wilson's] life, in addition to giving us a comprehensive account of his intellectual interests and achievements... This book will serve as the definitive account of its subject for many years to come.

(Wall Street Journal)

Lewis M. Dabney has enough knowledge to satisfy even the most captious reader.

(Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies 1900-01-00)

About the Author:

Lewis Dabney edited the Edmund Wilson Reader as well as Wilson's last journal, The Sixties (FSG, 1993). He is professor of English at the University of Wyoming.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0374113122
• ISBN 13: 9780374113124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 642