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. He attended Princeton University (1912-1916),...

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 1920s as a reporter and literary journalist, he extended...

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 structure and function with heredity, adaptation, and evolution,...

Edmund Wilson (May 8, 1895 – June 12 1972) was an American writer, noted chiefly for his literary criticism. Most literary experts considered Wilson the preeminent American literary critic of his day, and perhaps of the 20th...

SEVEN YEARS after the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, critic Edmund Wilson charged Jewish and Christian scholars with covering up the scrolls' challenges to the faith to protect their livelihoods. Dead wrong, said my professor. Scholars make their livings uncovering embarrassments--that's the path...

Justice to Edmund Wilson You are a cold, leprous person, Bunny Wilson. -Margaret Canby WRITING IN 1995 ON THE OCCASION OF the centennial of Edmund Wilson's birth, Morris Dickstein pointed out that, despite an abundance of memoirs, letters, diaries, and biographies...

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, who lived for decades on Manhattan's Upper West Side, died in her sleep Sunday night...

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 devoted his life to in over a thousand book reviews,...

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 could concern themselves with such matters, the arrival of a major new critic and a major literary idea was at once apparent…. Under the leadership of Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, the New Humanists had been maintaining a tight little fort of well-defended doubt against the great American tide of good intentions, self-expression, and d...

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 American letters, a venerable sage whose most impromptu and trivial scribbles must be embalmed in print and enshrined for all eternity. Ironically, Wilson had himself initiated this reverential salvage operation with the publication of A Prelude, in 1967; it began with the precocious diary, "My Trip Abroad," written when he was thirte...

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 testament to sustained powers of scholarship and intellectual conviction, Wilson has become increasingly detached from the central life of culture in this country, a life he once helped shape and color. And yet it does not seem to me to be the comfortable detachment of old fogyism—nothing so placid, unremarkable and unembattled as that&...