Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature

From the Jazz Age through the Kennedy administration, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. He wrote classics of literary and intellectual history, searching reportage, and insightful criticism. Steeped in knowledge of the era, this compelling narrative follows the critic´s intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America´s last great Renaissance man, a lucid commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Lewis M. Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained -in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity- a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader.