Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections

by Lewis M. Dabney (Editor)

Overview

"Edmund Wilson ... comes brilliantly to life in this wide-ranging collection of essays.... Not only do we get acute explorations of Wilson's criticism but incisive pieces on his other writing."--George Core, editor, The Sewanee ReviewEdmund Wilson, who helped shape American literary culture from the early 1920s through the mid-'60s, is still a presence a century after his birth. This vibrant collection emerges from symposiums in Wilson's centenary year, 1995, at the Mercantile Library in New York and at Princeton University. There prominent critics, literary journalists, and historians aired a variety of points of view about Wilson's work and the man. Assembled and edited by Lewis Dabney, the book shows the intellectual voices of a younger generation interacting with veterans who knew Wilson and his times.In the first part, Morris Dickstein, Jason Epstein, Barbara Epstein, David Bromwich, Jed Perl, and Mark Krupnick comment on Wilson's premises as a critic: his faith in reason, his version of modernism and eclectic interest in the arts, and his interest in Judaism--as a Protestant of Puritan stock who rejected Christianity. In the second part, a reading of the posthumously published journals by Neale Reinitz and a chapter from Dabney's biography-in-progress lead to the reminiscences of Elizabeth Hardwick, Jason Epstein, Mary Meigs, Roger Straus, and Alfred Kazin, as well as Michael C. D. Macdonald, the son of family friends, and the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar James A. Sanders. Two of Wilson's important works, his study of the Marxist intellectual tradition in To the Finland Station and of Civil War literature in Patriotic Gore, anchor discussion in the third part, which includes David Remnick, Daniel Aaron, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Randall Kennedy, and Andrew Delbanco joined from the floor by Toni Morrison and others. In the last part of the book, Louis Menand and Paul Berman offer divergent but complimentary approaches to the subject of Wilson in his historical moment and in ours. A discerning afterword by Sean Wilentz rounds out the volume.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691636931
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #370
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

Contributors

Introduction 3

Edmund Wilson: Three Phases 15

The Religion of the Enlightenment 27

Wilson's Romanticism 35

Wilson's Modernism 39

The Writer's Eye 53

Edmund Wilson and Gentile Philo-Semitism 70

A Reading of the Journals 91

The Perspective of Biography: 1929, A Turning Point 109

Remembering Edmund Wilson 135

The Admirable Minotaur of Money Hill 154

Revisiting the Critic on the Scrolls 169

Wilson's Lenin 177

The Independent Radical Observer 186

Wilson and Soviet Russia 195

Patriotic Gore and the Introduction 208

Omissions in Patriotic Gore 221

A Great Man's Limitations 233

Wilson Divided 240

Edmund Wilson in His Times 253

Wilson and Our Non-Wilsonian Age 266

Afterword 276

Index 285

Editorial Reviews

"Memories of the man, scholar, drinker, libertine, are mostly amused, affectionate and forbearing."

The New York Times Book Review

This solid but too disparate collection of essays and panel discussions (drawn from a series of 1995 symposia celebrating the centenary of his birth) revisits Wilson's life, work, and legacy.

Though he longed to be a novelist, Wilson found his greatest success with such classic critical and historical works as Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and To the Finland Station. He had a true gift for elucidation and was keenly enough attuned to the subtleties of his culture to become an active shaping force. In the words of Random House editor Jason Epstein: "He will eventually prove to be one of the greatest of our writers. Not so much for his individual works . . . but as perhaps the greatest teacher our literature has ever produced." Despite the similar accolades that lard this collection, one has to at least ask the question: Why? To critique the critic, to embed the historian in history, is to risk the law of diminishing returns, never mind academic navel-gazing. However, Dabney, a professor of English at the University of Wyoming and editor of several books by and about Wilson, has chosen most of his material well, and the list of contributors, from Arthur Schlesinger to Alfred Kazin and Louis Menand, is certainly impressive. But it is the nature of essays to be narrowly focused, and this leads here to a wallowing in minutiae. Essays on Wilson's philo-Semitism, romanticism, and lack of attention to minority writers, while well realized, are only fractionally revealing. More enlightening are the essays that broadly consider Wilson and his abiding cultural importance, particularly Louis Menand's "Edmund Wilson and His Times" and Paul Berman's "Wilson and Our Non-Wilsonian Age."

While the general reader will probably be lost throughout a good portion of this collection, it is a neat treat for die-hard Wilsonians.

Kirkus Reviews

"Edmund Wilson, who epitomized the man of letters for this century and who relished his role as the nation's leading literary curmudgeon and dictator, comes brilliantly to life in this wide-ranging collection of essays edited by his biographer, Lewis Dabney. Not only do we get acute explorations of Wilson's criticism but incisive pieces on his other writing and on aspects of his long disorderly life. Professor Dabney, his contributors, and the Princeton University Press are to be congratulated for this celebration of Wilson as he triumphantly passes his centennial and doggedly sets sail for another century."—-George Core, Editor, The Sewanee Review

From the Publisher