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Edmund Wilson: Literary Reviews and Essays (two volumes)

Edited by Lewis M. Dabney

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Overview

Overview

News “O Indispensable Books!”: A Peek at Edmund Wilson’s Summer Reading List
May 21, 2025

The dominant American literary critic from the 1920s until his death in 1972, Edmund Wilson was also a chronicler of his time, a historian of ideas, and a probing observer of himself and of the society around him. This two-volume set includes his five collections of literary pieces from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, as well as 12 uncollected essays from this period.

The Shores of Light is Wilson’s magisterial assemblage of early reviews, sketches, stories, memoirs, and other writings into a teeming panorama of America’s literary life in a period of exuberant expansion and in the years of political and economic strife that followed. Wilson traces the emergence of a new American writing as he reviews the work of Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder, and many others, including his close friends F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Axel’s Castle, his pioneering overview of literary modernism, includes penetrating studies of Yeats, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and others. For several generations this book has stood as an indispensable companion to some of the crucial turning points in modern literature.

The Triple Thinkers and The Wound and the Bow give us Wilson at the height of his powers. 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 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.

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1937 pages

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Edmund Wilson: Literary Reviews and Essays (two volumes)

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