Edmund Wilson
1856-1939
American cytologist who helped discover the existence and nature of sex chromosomes. Wilson's "The Cell in Heredity and Development" (1928) integrated cell...
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The American critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) pursued an independent course that secured him respect and eminence.Edmund Wilson was born in Red Bank, N.J., on May 8, 1895, the son of a railroad lawyer...
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Edmund Wilson's unique position in American literature was established during a long career in which he undertook the duties and challenges of the man of letters. After having started work in the 1920...
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Critical Essay by Charles I. Glicksberg
[Mr. Edmund Wilson's] achievement as a critic springs in a large measure from … his refusal to swallow any political faith or literary formula, h...
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Critical Essay by Louis Fraiberg
In Wilson's scheme …, psychoanalysis is a part of the historical method; its value in his criticism, presumably, lies not in what it is itself but in th...
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Critical Essay by Frank Kermode
Mr. Wilson is a very productive author; I don't know if he would call Axel's Castle his best book, though he might agree that it is his most influential....
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Critical Essay by Richard Gilman
In the years since [the publication of A Piece of My Mind], while his productivity has remained amazingly high and at least one book—Patriotic Gore—is a...
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Critical Essay by Clive James
The literary chronicles, especially The Shores of Light, are commonly valued above Wilson's more integrated books, and although it seems likely that the people do...
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Critical Essay by Lewis M. Dabney
A Window on Russia uses the very language of the Russian classics as a mirror of the national character, one Wilson finds both attractive and impractical. He combine...
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Critical Essay by Pearl K. Bell
A sorry fate is overtaking the reputation of Edmund Wilson. Since his death … there has been an increasing tendency to portray Wilson as the Grand Cham of Ameri...
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Critical Essay by Richard M. Cook
In his introduction to [Letters on Literature and Politics] Daniel Aaron states that Wilson "professed literature." It would be as accurate to say that...
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Critical Essay by Larzer Ziff
In common with other notable creators, Edmund Wilson possessed a sensibility that at its intensest achieved a fusion of time and place so that a particular period took o...
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Critical Essay by Irving Howe
Almost everyone looked up to him. Writers and critics looked up to him, both those for whom he served as mentor and those ambitious enough to take him as model. So, too,...
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Critical Essay by Edw Ard Fiess
Wilson's literary criticism, almost from the beginning, has been marked by a double attention to art (the techniques of the artist, the narrower implications of...
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Critical Essay by Delmore Schwartz
The view of the artist and of the genesis of literary works which has become a method for Wilson in The Wound and the Bow is stated [in his novel, I Thought of Dais...
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Critical Essay by Robert M. Adams
At the moment when Prosperity and the New Humanism were falling like twin meteors from portentous skies, Edmund Wilson published Axel's Castle. To all who cou...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Edgar Hyman
Wilson is at his best as an "introductory critic," a term that John Macy defined as "one who by his own skill and charm summons strangers to...
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Critical Essay by William Phillips
I suppose literary history will class Wilson as a social critic, and recently there has been a tendency, mostly on the part of the younger formalist critics, to bru...
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Critical Essay by Alfred Kazin
Edmund Wilson is not like any other critic: some critics are boring even when they are original; he fascinates even when he is wrong. [The Shores of Light] is unusual, ...
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Critical Essay by Edwin Honig
Edmund Wilson is that rare sort of American writer, a master of prose style. (p. 99)
Poe, De Quincy, Shaw, Balzac, France, Dickens, Joyce, and to some extent Huneker ...
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Critical Essay by John Wain
To be a Wilsonian critic, even at a junior level, calls for a lot of effort. You can imitate, say, Mr. Blackmur, simply by refusing to express yourself clearly. Even Profe...
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Elizabeth Hardwick, a Kentucky-born author and critic whose incisive prose and steady spirit helped her well fulfill her dream of becoming a "New York Intellectual," has died at age 91.Hardwick, wh...
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ALFRED KAZIN: A BIOGRAPHY By Richard M. Cook Yale University Press, 452 pages, $35
With the death of Alfred Kazin in 1998 at the age of 83, the kind of high-end literary journalism that he’d ...
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Last year in Paris, I went to a Chaplin exhibit at the Jeu de Paume. There were artifacts, stills, posters and very well done video projections of scenes from his films. One of the scenes being sho...
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Last year in Paris, I went to a Chaplin exhibit at the Jeu de Paume. There were artifacts, stills, posters and very well done video projections of scenes from his films. One of the scenes being sho...
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After Barbara Epstein died of lung cancer on Friday, June 16, at the age of 77, it was natural for the large circle of people—many of whom came to know her over four decades of editing The Ne...
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Oh my God, I’ve stumbled upon what seems to be a terrible literary tragedy in the making. Or perhaps we’re getting what we deserve.
But I feel I would be remiss not to alert the world ...
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Oh my God, I’ve stumbled upon what seems to be a terrible literary tragedy in the making. Or perhaps we’re getting what we deserve.
But I feel I would be remiss not to alert the world...
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A great blessing in life is that most people can get used to anything. And a great curse in life is that most people can get used to anything. At home and on the battlefield, the most peaceful, dec...
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A great blessing in life is that most people can get used to anything. And a great curse in life is that most people can get used to anything. At home and on the battlefield, the most peaceful, dec...
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Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson
Critical Essay by Charles I. Glicksberg
Author-critic dead at 91
