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Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s
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.
1000 pages, Hardcover
First published October 4, 2007
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About the author
Edmund Wilson
302 books158 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. See also physicist Edmund Wilson.
Edmund Wilson Jr. was a towering figure in 20th-century American literary criticism, known for his expansive intellect, stylistic clarity, and commitment to serious literary and political engagement. Over a prolific career, Wilson wrote for Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, shaping the critical conversation on literature, politics, and culture. His major critical works—such as Axel's Castle and Patriotic Gore—combined literary analysis with historical insight, and he ventured boldly into subjects typically reserved for academic specialists, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, Native American cultures, and the American Civil War.
Wilson was also the author of fiction, memoirs, and plays, though his influence rested most strongly on his literary essays and political writing. He was instrumental in promoting the reputations of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, and many others. Despite his friendships with several of these authors, his criticism could be unflinching, even scathing—as seen in his public dismissal of H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien. His combative literary style often drew attention, and his exacting standards for writing, along with his distaste for popular or commercial literature, placed him in a tradition of high-minded literary seriousness.
Beyond the realm of letters, Wilson was politically active, aligning himself at times with socialist ideals and vocally opposing Cold War policies and the Vietnam War. His principled refusal to pay income tax in protest of U.S. militarization led to a legal battle and a widely read protest book.
Wilson was married four times and had several significant personal and intellectual relationships, including with Fitzgerald and Nabokov. He also advocated for the preservation and celebration of American literary heritage, a vision realized in the creation of the Library of America after his death. For his contributions to American letters, Wilson received multiple honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His legacy endures through his extensive body of work, which remains a touchstone for literary scholars and general readers alike.
Edmund Wilson Jr. was a towering figure in 20th-century American literary criticism, known for his expansive intellect, stylistic clarity, and commitment to serious literary and political engagement. Over a prolific career, Wilson wrote for Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, shaping the critical conversation on literature, politics, and culture. His major critical works—such as Axel's Castle and Patriotic Gore—combined literary analysis with historical insight, and he ventured boldly into subjects typically reserved for academic specialists, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, Native American cultures, and the American Civil War.
Wilson was also the author of fiction, memoirs, and plays, though his influence rested most strongly on his literary essays and political writing. He was instrumental in promoting the reputations of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, and many others. Despite his friendships with several of these authors, his criticism could be unflinching, even scathing—as seen in his public dismissal of H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien. His combative literary style often drew attention, and his exacting standards for writing, along with his distaste for popular or commercial literature, placed him in a tradition of high-minded literary seriousness.
Beyond the realm of letters, Wilson was politically active, aligning himself at times with socialist ideals and vocally opposing Cold War policies and the Vietnam War. His principled refusal to pay income tax in protest of U.S. militarization led to a legal battle and a widely read protest book.
Wilson was married four times and had several significant personal and intellectual relationships, including with Fitzgerald and Nabokov. He also advocated for the preservation and celebration of American literary heritage, a vision realized in the creation of the Library of America after his death. For his contributions to American letters, Wilson received multiple honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His legacy endures through his extensive body of work, which remains a touchstone for literary scholars and general readers alike.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 6, 2018
I picked this up strictly for Wilson's essay, "The Wound and the Bow," an explication of the appeal of Sophocles' tragedy, "Philoctetes," which has been an obsession of mine for the last few weeks. And found his essay was a great, brief unpacking of some of the stuff going on in the play. A lot of learning in a small package.
I don't think I've ever reach much by Wilson before, and so when I finished that essay, I thumbed through the contents, and have now read about a dozen of the other essays and reviews in this volume, covering etiquette books, detective stories, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, etc. He has a very sensitive and sensible reading of "Finnegans Wake" that might actually lead me to try to tackle that beast again.
But now I'm going to shove this book away from me (i.e. return it to the library) so I don't end up reading the whole thousand pages. And will resist the temptation to browse through the other volume of his essays in the Library of America series. In the cover notes they give him credit as "the writer who first conceived the idea of a publishing series dedicated to 'bringing out in a compete and compact form the principal American classics.'"
I don't think I've ever reach much by Wilson before, and so when I finished that essay, I thumbed through the contents, and have now read about a dozen of the other essays and reviews in this volume, covering etiquette books, detective stories, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, etc. He has a very sensitive and sensible reading of "Finnegans Wake" that might actually lead me to try to tackle that beast again.
But now I'm going to shove this book away from me (i.e. return it to the library) so I don't end up reading the whole thousand pages. And will resist the temptation to browse through the other volume of his essays in the Library of America series. In the cover notes they give him credit as "the writer who first conceived the idea of a publishing series dedicated to 'bringing out in a compete and compact form the principal American classics.'"
December 1, 2012
I never read any of Wilson's New Yorker pieces and they are great! On a variety of subjects, I enjoyed the stuff about Sartre, but all of it was interesting.
Reminiscent of Updike's great HUGGING THE SHORE, which is one of the great surveys of literary history.
Reminiscent of Updike's great HUGGING THE SHORE, which is one of the great surveys of literary history.
March 15, 2026
Edmund Wilson’s author photo on the front cover of this volume shows him looking a bit stern, somewhat severe, hawk-like: altogether serious. The impression is misleading. Wilson’s writing seems always to be serious-minded, but the tone isn’t always purely serious. He gets playful and practically frisky in the titles of some of his essays. Examples from The Shores of Light, in the previous LOA volume: “It’s Terrible! It's Ghastly! It Stinks” and “Shut Up That Russian Novel.” Similar exclamations from this volume: “’You Can’t Do That to Me!’ Shrilled Celia” and “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” More on his view of detective fiction in a minute. A few of his titles make no pretense of levity in the wording but suggest a funny (odd) clash of concepts, as in “The Antrobuses and the Earwickers,” which sounds like a hot night in the literary cage-match arena and more or less is; the essay concerns Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth facing off against James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. The face-off is illuminating and takes a view I haven’t seen elsewhere.
The text of these pieces also provides little zings of fun. Of The Robe—a Christians-and-Romans novel, later a film, akin to Quo Vadis? and Ben-Hur—he says, “It differs from Bulwer-Lytton only in being written worse.” Note that Wilson, writing in the 1940s, assumes that his readers might still be acquainted with the once-popular Victorian novelist Bulwer-Lytton, who is nowadays mostly condemned as the author of “It was a dark and stormy night.” Sic transit gloria mundi. There’s a lot of smartness here as well—not show-offy but perceptive and insightful. In Shaw’s plays, for instance, Wilson traces a musical quality and concludes that it’s “a music of ideas”: not only an attractive phrase but also an assessment more comprehensive than the familiar “too clever by half” view of Shaw.
Sometimes, Wilson goes against the prevailing wind. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited seems to be widely admired (“arguably [his] best novel,” Britannica says), and Wilson finds things to praise in it, but he also flatly declares that “the novel is a Catholic tract.” Catholicism isn’t the problem; it’s the tract-like qualities, to which Wilson devotes a substantial paragraph. This may be a minority view, but I agree with him wholeheartedly.
However, in another case where Wilson goes against the grain, he may come off as wrongheaded. He finds most detective stories uninteresting, poorly written, deficient in characterization and atmosphere. At least he sums things up in an amusing way: “My final conclusion is that the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.”
One of the advantages of the LOA editions is that one can take a dip, climb out, and go back in later. In this one, so far, I’ve read parts of The Triple Thinkers, parts of The Wound and the Bow, parts of Classics and Commercials, and one piece in the Uncollected Reviews section, on Dawn Powell’s My Home Is Far Away.
The text of these pieces also provides little zings of fun. Of The Robe—a Christians-and-Romans novel, later a film, akin to Quo Vadis? and Ben-Hur—he says, “It differs from Bulwer-Lytton only in being written worse.” Note that Wilson, writing in the 1940s, assumes that his readers might still be acquainted with the once-popular Victorian novelist Bulwer-Lytton, who is nowadays mostly condemned as the author of “It was a dark and stormy night.” Sic transit gloria mundi. There’s a lot of smartness here as well—not show-offy but perceptive and insightful. In Shaw’s plays, for instance, Wilson traces a musical quality and concludes that it’s “a music of ideas”: not only an attractive phrase but also an assessment more comprehensive than the familiar “too clever by half” view of Shaw.
Sometimes, Wilson goes against the prevailing wind. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited seems to be widely admired (“arguably [his] best novel,” Britannica says), and Wilson finds things to praise in it, but he also flatly declares that “the novel is a Catholic tract.” Catholicism isn’t the problem; it’s the tract-like qualities, to which Wilson devotes a substantial paragraph. This may be a minority view, but I agree with him wholeheartedly.
However, in another case where Wilson goes against the grain, he may come off as wrongheaded. He finds most detective stories uninteresting, poorly written, deficient in characterization and atmosphere. At least he sums things up in an amusing way: “My final conclusion is that the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.”
One of the advantages of the LOA editions is that one can take a dip, climb out, and go back in later. In this one, so far, I’ve read parts of The Triple Thinkers, parts of The Wound and the Bow, parts of Classics and Commercials, and one piece in the Uncollected Reviews section, on Dawn Powell’s My Home Is Far Away.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews