Edmund Wilson

Controversial upon publication in 1946, Memoirs of Hecate County remained banned for more than a decade before being reissued. A favorite among his own books, Edmund Wilson's erotic and devestating portrait of the upper middle class still holds up today as a corrosive indictment of the adultery and intellectual posturing that lie at the heart of suburban America.

A Window on Russia is a collection of Edmund Wilson's papers on Russian writers and the Russian language (which he taught himself to read), written between 1943 and 1971. Writers discussed include Pushkin, Gogol, Chekov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, among others.

The Wound and the Bow contains seven essays by "The greatest literary critic of the twentieth century." -New York magazine. Combining biographical and critical sketches, Edmund Wilson writes brilliantly on a wide-range of authors including Dickens, Kipling, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce, Jacques Casanova, and Sophocles. "In the best tradition of literary criticism… combines exact information with shrewd and searching penetration into...

The last of Edmund Wilson's posthumously published journals turned out to be one of his major books, The Sixties: the Last Journal, 1960-1972, a personal history that is also brilliant social comedy and an anatomy of the times. Wilson catches the flavor of an international elite, Stravinsky, Auden, Andre Malraux, and Isaiah Berlin, as well as the New York literati and the Kennedy White House, but he never strays too far from the common life, whether...

Edmund Wilson's last collection of criticism, The Devils & Canon Barham, contains ten essays on Poets, Novelists, and Monsters. Previously published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, Wilson's writing featured in this volume sees the critic returning to his roots and youth, with essays on his childhood love for The Ingoldsby Legends, the works of Hemingway, Eliot's The Waste Land, and ends with a piece on The Monsters of Bomarzo...