Edmund Wilson is not like any other critic: some critics are boring even when they are original; he fascinates even when he is wrong. [The Shores of Light] is unusual, to begin with, because not since Randolph Bourne and H. L. Mencken have we had another critic whose back pieces could so naturally and still so vibrantly bring forth a vanished age. (p. 93)

This is a book of many deaths, it seems; it is, in fact, its own retrospect. He brings us up to a period whose basic conviction is that no man is any longer his own master; it reaches back to those Vergilian shores of light—"in luminis oras"—to which every living form aspires, and which a remarkable generation of writers once identified with the personal liberation of every chafed, suppressed, and rebellious human being under the American sky.

Reading these pieces thus involves us...