Edmund Wilson

Description

Wilson, a heavy drinker, certainly had a melancholy streak, a contentious character and a frightening demeanor. All this helps make him a fascinating man. But Wilson also had extraordinarily wide interests and ranged far beyond literature. He wrote about art, theater, music, film, popular culture as well as political events, foreign travel, the revolutionary tradition in Europe, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Zuni and Iroquois Indians, the American Civil War, the culture and politics of Canada. He was the master of the biographical essay and the autobiographical memoir, and was the greatest diarist of his time. Far from fading into obscurity and being ignored by contemporary readers, eleven of his fifty books are still in print, and his publishers have brought out eleven new works since his death -- more than most living authors have written in the last twenty years. - Preface.

Description

This pioneering life of Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) completes the trilogy on modern American writers that Jeffrey Meyers began with his biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Wilson, whom Gore Vidal called "America's best mind," had extraordinarily wide interests that ranged far beyond literature. He wrote about art, theater, music, film, and popular culture as well as political events, foreign travel, the revolutionary tradition in Europe, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Zuni and Iroquois Indians, the American Civil War, the culture and politics of Canada. He was a master of the biographical essay and the autobiographical memoir and was the greatest diarist of his time. . Wilson's life was as interesting as his books and, in its own way, as romantic and chaotic as Fitzgerald's. He lived in bohemian poverty in the 1920s and '30s, suffered a nervous breakdown and the tragic death of his second wife, had three other wives (including Mary McCarthy), attracted an astonishing number of beautiful mistresses (including Edna St. Vincent Millay), and was a compulsive chronicler of his own sexual adventures.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Edmund Wilson: a biographyHardcoverHoughton Mifflin1995-01-01
• Edmund WilsonHoughton Mifflin1995-01-01
• Edmund WilsonHoughton Mifflin1995-01-01
• Edmund WilsonPaperbackCooper Square Press2003-12-25