by Payal Mudliar

1. Edmund Wilson
SHRI BALAJI INFOTECH
By Payal Mudliar
An Introduction

2. Edmund Wilson
An Introduction

3. 3
• Edmund Wilson, byname Bunny was born on May 8, 1895 in
Red Bank, New Jersey, U.S.
• He died on June 12, 1972, Talcottville , New
York
• American critic and essayist recognized as one of the
leading literary journalists of his time.
• Educated at Princeton, Wilson moved from newspaper
reporting in New York to become managing editor of Vanity
fair (1920-21),

4. 4
• He was associate editor of the New Republic (1926-31), and
principal book reviewer for The New Yorker (1944-48).
• Wilson’s first critical work, Axel’s Castle (1931), was an
important international survey of the symbolist tradition.
• He both criticized and praised the aestheticism of such
writers as William Butler Yeats, Paul Valery, T.S. Eliot,
Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.
• During this period, Wilson was married for a time to writer
Mary McCarthy.

5. 5
• His next major book, To the Finland Station (1940), was a
historical
study of the thinkers who laid the groundwork for socialism
and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
• Much of these two books originally appeared in the pages
of the New Republic.
• Until late in 1940 he was a contributor to that periodical,
and much of his work for it was collected in Travels in
two Democracies (1936), dialogues, essays, and a short
story about the soviet Union and the United States.

6. 6
• The Triple Thinkers (1938), which dealt with writers involved
in multiple meanings; The Wound and the Bow (1941), about
art and neurosis; and the Boys in the Back Room (1941), a
discussion of such new American novelists as John Steinbeck
and James M. Cain.
• After World War Wilson wrote The Scrolls from the Dead sea
(1955), for which he learned to read, studies in four
Civilizations: Zuni, Haiti, Soviet Russia, Israel (1956); Apologies
to the Iroquois (1960); Patriotic Gore (1962), an analysis of
American civil War literature; and O Canada: an American’s
Notes on Canadian Culture (1965).

7. 7
• In this period five volumes of his magazine pieces were
collected: Europe Without Baederker (1947), Classics and
Commercials (1950), The Shores of Light (1952), The
American Earthquake (1958), and The Bit Between My
Teeth (1965)..
• In other works Wilson gave evidence of his crotchety
character.
 His plays are in part collected in five Plays (1954) and
in the Duke of Palermo and Other Plays with an Open
Letter to Mike Nichols (1969).

8. 8
• His poems appear in Notebooks of Night (1942) and in
Night Thoughts (1961); an early collection, Poets, Farewell,
appeared in 1929. Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) is a
collection, of short stories that encountered censorship
problems when it first appeared.
 Wilson edited the posthumous papers and notebook s of his
college friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945), and
also edited the novel The Last Tycoon (1941), which
Fitzgerald had left uncompleted at his death.

9. 9
• Wilson concerned himself with both literary and social
themes and wrote as historian, poet, novelist, editor, and
short-story writer.
• He covered a multitude of subjects, probing each with an
expansiveness that was firmly rooted in scholarship and
common sense.
• He expressed his views in a prose style noted for its
clarity and precision.

10. 10
• His critical writings on the
American novelists Ernest
Hemingway, john Dos Passos, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and William
Faulkner attracted public interest to
their early work and guided
opinion toward their acceptance.

11. Thanks!
11
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