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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 1920s as a reporter and literary journalist, he extended his field of activity to social criticism, in-depth analysis of literature and art, popular culture and the lively arts, modern and ancient history, travel writing, drama, fiction, and poetry. Oddly enough he approached each kind of writing with the seriousness of thorough preparation that set him apart from the old-fashioned amateur essayist and literary connoisseur. Always the professional, he offered through his work his prodigious learning, his reporter's clear eye, and his disciplined perspective. While Wilson's criticism of art and society often depended on intuition, taste, and his own standards of the human usefulness of literature and man's cultural and political productions, he was essentially guided by three currents in twentieth-century thought: aestheticism, with its emphasis on the work of art itself, its shape and texture; Marxism, with its concern for the material conditions that produce culture; and Freudianism, with its curiosity about motives, latent content, and trauma.
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