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), where he was editor of the Nassau Literary Magazine and a friend of writers John Peale Bishop and F. Scott Fitzgerald. With Bishop, he was later to publish a miscellany, The Undertaker's Garland (1922); after Fitzgerald's death, Wilson compiled in The Crack-up (1945) the tragic story of the disaster which overtook that novelist.

After taking a bachelor of arts degree, Wilson was briefly a reporter for the New York Sun. Drawn into World War I, he served in a French hospital and in United States intelligence. He then became managing editor of Vanity Fair. The first of his four marriages took place in 1923. He was, in turn, book review editor and associate...