Wilson, Edmund, 1895–1972, American critic and author, b. Red Bank, N.J. grad. Princeton, 1916. He is considered one of the most important American literary and social critics of the 20th cent. From 1920 to 1921 he was managing editor of Vanity Fair, and he was later on the staffs of the New Republic (1926–31) and The New Yorker (1944–48). In the 1930s he was much interested in the theories of Freud Freud, Sigmund (froid), 1856–1939, Austrian psychiatrist, founder of psychoanalysis .
..... Click the link for more information. and Marx Marx, Karl, 1818–83, German social philosopher, the chief theorist of modern socialism and communism .

Early Life

Marx's father, a lawyer, converted from Judaism to Lutheranism in 1824.
..... Click the link for more information. , ideas that are treated in many of his works. Among his major writings are Axel's Castle (1931), a study of symbolism (see symbolists symbolists, in literature, a school originating in France toward the end of the 19th cent. in reaction to the naturalism and realism of the period. Designed to convey impressions by suggestion rather than by direct statement, symbolism found its first expression in
..... Click the link for more information. ) and other imaginative modernist literatures; The Wound and the Bow (1941); The Shores of Light (1952); and Patriotic Gore (1962), on the American Civil War.

As a critic Wilson was concerned with the social, psychological, and political conditions that shape literary ideas. His social studies include To the Finland Station (1940), a history of the European revolutionary tradition that praises the Soviet Union (a position he soon reversed), and The American Earthquake (1958), a record of the Great Depression. His versatility is further revealed in his I Thought of Daisy (1929), a novel; Memoirs of Hecate County (1949), short stories; and Five Plays (1954). Wilson also edited F. Scott Fitzgerald Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, 1900–1947, b. Montgomery, Ala., was also a writer. She was intermittently confined to sanatoriums after 1930 for schizophrenia, but still managed to publish short stories and a novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932, repr. 1974).
..... Click the link for more information. 's unfinished The Last Tycoon and posthumous The Crack-up (both: 1945). His later works include Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1955), A Window on Russia (1973), and The Devils and Canon Barham: 10 Essays on Poets, Novelists, and Monsters (1973). Wilson's third wife was the author Mary McCarthy McCarthy, Mary Therese, 1912–89, American writer, b. Seattle, grad. Vassar, 1933. As drama critic for the Partisan Review (1937–45), she gained a reputation for wit, intellect, and acerbity.
..... Click the link for more information. .

Bibliography

See his autobiographical Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty (1956) and Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York (1971); his notebooks and diaries, ed. by L. Edel (4 vol., 1975–86); his letters, ed. by E. Wilson (1977); his letters with Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by S. Karlinsky (1979); other letters, ed. by D. Castronova and J. Groth (2002); memoirs of his daughter, R. Wilson (1989); biographies by C. P. Frank (1970), J. Groth (1989), J. Meyers (1995), and L. M. Dabney (2005); studies by G. Douglas (1983) and D. Castronovo (1984 and 1998); bibliography by R. D. Ramsey (1971).

Wilson, Edmund

Edmund Wilson

(credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.)

(born May 8, 1895, Red Bank, N.J., U.S.—died June 12, 1972, Talcottville, N.Y.) U.S. critic and essayist. He attended Princeton University and initially worked as a reporter and magazine editor. Much of his writing, in which he probed diverse subjects with scholarship and common sense in clear and precise prose, was published in The New Republic and The New Yorker. Among his influential critical works are Axel's Castle (1931), a survey of the Symbolist poets; To the Finland Station (1940), a study of the thinkers who set the stage for the Russian Revolution; and Patriotic Gore (1962), analyzing American Civil War literature. His other writings include plays, poetry, the short-story collection Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), and five volumes of posthumously published journals. He was widely regarded as the leading critic of his time.

Wilson, Edmund (1895–1972) writer, editor; born in Red Bank, N.J. After taking his B.A. at Princeton (1916) and serving with the U.S. Army in World War I, he went to New York City and became an editor for such periodicals as Vanity Fair (1920–21) and the New Republic (1926–31); he was the regular book reviewer for the New Yorker (1944–48) and thereafter contributed occasional reviews. He wrote a novel, plays, poems, and short stories, but except for a collection of the last named, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), his creative work did not command much attention. Instead, he gained his reputation as the dean of American letters through his erudite and trenchant nonfictional works. As he became interested in various topics, he would learn whatever languages were necessary, and after immersing himself in the subject, he would produce his own original interpretations, such as To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940) and The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955). His major reputation rests on his literary criticism, exhibited in such works as Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931) and Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962). He edited the uncollected works of his Princeton classmate, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1954), and wrote countless magazine articles, essays, and reviews. He published two autobiographical works, and after his death a series of memoirs were extracted from his diaries and notebooks. He was married four times, including to Mary McCarthy (1938–46). Based in New York City for much of his life, he also spent parts of each year in Wellfleet, Mass., and at his family home in upstate New York.