Edmund Wilson

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Edmund Beecher Wilson (1856 - 1939) was an American geneticist.

Edmund Wilson (May 8, 1895 – June 12 1972) was an American writer, noted chiefly for his literary criticism. He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and educated first at The Hill School and then Princeton. He began his writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun, and served in the army during the First World War. He was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920 and 1921, and later served on the staffs of The New Republic and The New Yorker.

Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931) was a sweeping survey of Symbolism and Arthur Rimbaud, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (author of Axel), W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Wilson was interested in modern culture as a whole, and many of his writings go beyond the realm of pure literary criticism. In his book To the Finland Station, he studied the course of European socialism, from the 1824 discovery by Jules Michelet of Vico culminating in the 1917 arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station of Saint Petersburg to lead the Bolshevik Revolution.

Wilson's early works are heavily influenced by the ideas of Freud and Marx, reflecting his deep interest in their work.

He was a close friend of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and edited his final book for posthumous publication, and also a friend of Vladimir Nabokov, with whom he corresponded extensively and whose writing he introduced to Western audiences; however, their friendship was damaged by Wilson's cool reaction to Nabokov's Lolita and by a dispute over Wilson's criticism of Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

Wilson's second wife, Mary McCarthy, was also well-known for her literary criticism, and they co-operated on numerous works before their divorce.

Wilson's critical works helped foster public appreciation for U.S. novelists Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Nabokov.

Wilson was also an outspoken critic of U.S. Cold War policies. He did not pay his income tax from 1946 to 1955 and was subsequently investigated by the Internal Revenue Service. He also failed to pay state income taxes, which had little or nothing to do with the Cold War. Wilson eventually received lenient treatment: he was let off with a much smaller fine than the IRS originally sought ($25,000 as opposed to the original $69,000, thanks to political connections Wilson had with the Kennedy administration), and he received no jail time, which he could easily have gotten for ten years of failing to file any returns. In his book The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest (1963), Wilson argued that, as a result of competitive militarization against the Soviet Union, the civil liberties of Americans were being paradoxically infringed upon under the guise of defense from Communism. Likewise he opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War.

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Works (selected)

Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931.
To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1940.
The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1941.
Memoirs of Hecate County, Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1946.
The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948.
Red, Black, Blond and Olive, London: W. H. Allen, 1956.
Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Co, 1950.
The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, Fontana Books, 1955.
A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty,New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956.
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962.
The Cold War and the Income Tax: A protest, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1964.
Europe without Baedeker: Sketches among the Ruins of Italy, Greece and England, with Notes from a European Diary: 1963-1964, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967.
The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
Apologies to the Iroquois, New York, NY: Vintage, 1960.
The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953.
The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958.
The Twenties
The Thirties
The Forties
The Fifties
The Sixties: The Last Journal 1960-1972, New York, NY: The Noonday Press, 1993.