Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature - Tapa blanda

This thorough biography gives the definitive treatment to the life and work of one of the early twentieth century's most highly revered men of letters.

There are echoes of Wilson's infectious curiosity and sky-high standards in the eloquently paced, beautifully considered prose of this masterful biography. The quicksilver movement of Dabney's sentences is propelled by deep, complex ideas.

Dabney, a veteran Wilson scholar... is an academic who knows how to write. The result is a book that will seize any passionate reader of literature by the throat.

Fascinating, admirably ample, intelligent, and balanced... Dabney knows his subject cold, and he has drawn a realistic, poignant portrait of Wilson that conveys the personal experiences feeding the work, and vice versa.

An outsize biography that doesn't stint in chronicling the intimate and often stormy aspects of [Wilson's] life, in addition to giving us a comprehensive account of his intellectual interests and achievements... This book will serve as the definitive account of its subject for many years to come.

Lewis M. Dabney has enough knowledge to satisfy even the most captious reader.

From the Jazz Age through the Kennedy administration, Edmund Wilson (1895--1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. A champion of the young Ernest Hemingway, a loyal friend and mentor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and an ally of John Dos Passos during the Depression, Wilson wrote classics of literary and intellectual history (including Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and insightful criticism. Though he documented his private life in openly erotic fiction and journals, he left the personal dramas at its center in shadow. Lewis M. Dabney, the first writer to integrate Wilson's life and work, vividly encompasses his formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, his tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and his lasting accord with Elena Mumm Thornton, as well as his volatile friendship with Vladimir Nabokov and enduring ties with W. H. Auden and Isaiah Berlin.

Steeped in knowledge of the era, this compelling narrative follows the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a lucid commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained -- in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity -- a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader. Edmund Wilson has been widely recognized as the authoritative biography of a brilliant man whose life reflected the grand sweep of twentieth-century cultural, social, and human experience.