Wilson, Edmund 1895-1972
US literary critic, social commentator and novelist

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, he was educated at Princeton and became a journalist with Vanity Fair, editor of the New Republic (1926-31), and chief book reviewer for the New Yorker. A lively, waspish critic of other writers, his own fiction, of which Memoirs of Hecate Country (1946) is the most notable example, is largely forgotten. However, few critics have caused such a stir as he, and he was more listened to than most. Axel's Castle (1931), a study of Symbolist literature, is a landmark, but To a Finland Station (1940), an account of the origins of the Bolshevik Revolution, and The Wound and the Bow (1941), a study of the relation between psychic malaise and creativity, are no less significant. In Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) he surveyed in detail the writers of the period. Over a wide-ranging oeuvre and argumentative life he published on many subjects and in a variety of forms, encompassing plays, articles, correspondence (see his correspondence with Vladimir Nabokov) and, in The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955), for which he learned Hebrew, a contentious but illuminating guide to a complex subject. Various memoirs detailing his life have appeared. He married four times, the third marriage being to the novelist Mary McCarthy, whose own turbulent career he defended even after their relationship had foundered.

Bibliography: D Castronovo, Edmund Wilson (1984)