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, did a company of cultivated readers who knew that regularly Edmund Wilson would come bearing gifts: Read Kipling, even if you detest his politics; read Ulysses Grant's memoirs, even though he was a brute of a general and a dolt of a President; read Agnon, read Dawn Powell, read Pushkin (hopeless as he sounds in English translation), read the Haitian novelist, Philippe Thoby-Marcelin. The whole sweep of world literature seemed in Wilson's grasp, to be sifted, judged, protected. He could sometimes be difficult, even haughty, but in his work he was profoundly the democrat, eager to share every pleasure of literary discovery.

His career took on a heroic shape, the curve of the writer who attains...