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Wilson, Edmund 1895–1972: Critical Essay by Richard Gilman

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About 10 pages (2,932 words)
Edmund Wilson Summary

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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….

A number of writers have remarked on how Wilson is not temperamentally a man of our time, and he has confirmed it; and it has been said that after a crisis in his personal life and his beliefs he retreated into a private world, into literature cut off from political actuality and observation cut off from the crucial scene to be observed. The notion that he is a great literary critic (as well as a social critic) who has substituted literature for life is widespread, and is, I believe, thoroughly mistaken; he is, on the contrary, a critic who for a very long time has not really criticized, a man who has substituted the superficies of literature for its real life and held that at bay.

This is a free excerpt of 205 words. There are 2,932 words (approx. 10 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.

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Wilson, Edmund 1895–1972: Critical Essay by Richard Gilman from Literature Criticism Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

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