Edmund Wilson: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

Overview

This comprehensive biography of prolific critic, essayist, historian, and novelist Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) posits, quite successfully, that the subject lived a life as romantic and chaotic as his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald's. Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown and the tragic death of his second wife (he was married four times, among them, Mary McCarthy); had affairs with numerous beautiful women, including Edna St. Vincent Millay; and was friend to literary giants such as John Dos Passos, Vladimir Nabakov, and W.H. Auden.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781461664512
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	09/02/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	592
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of Inherited Risk and Edgar Allan Poe, lives in Berkeley, California.

Editorial Reviews

A remarkable feat of biographical sleuthing, this refreshingly down-to-earth life of critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) peers beneath the crusty persona of a grandee of the literary establishment to portray a tormented, restless, sexually hyperactive man, a difficult, heavy-drinking husband to four wives, a domineering, lecturing father to his three children. Biographer of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Meyers considers Wilson the most intelligent and cosmopolitan figure in American letters, a foe of mindless authority and ideological conformity; yet that assessment is undercut by Wilson's flirtation with communism, his isolationism in WWII and his insistence as late as 1957 that U.S. war crimes were even more horrible than Nazi Germany's. We learn that Wilson's second wife, California socialite Margaret Canby, died not by slipping on pavement, as newspapers reported; instead, ``almost certainly drunk,'' she fell down a flight of stairs and fractured her skull. Meyers rejects third wife Mary McCarthy's vitriolic-pen portraits of Wilson, arguing that their marriage, though stormy, was highly productive for both of them. He also illuminates Wilson's friendships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Malraux, Auden et al. and his sexual affairs with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anais Nin and Louise Bogan. This is the fullest portrait to date of a writer who, in Meyers's judgment, became increasingly alienated from the modern world. Photos not seen by PW. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Meyers, a prolific writer of literary criticism and biography, including Scott Fitzgerald (LJ 4/1/94), took only a year to produce this first major study of the eminent 20th-century American literary and social critic Edmund Wilson. And it shows. Meyers writes carelessly, sometimes contradicting himself, sometimes including information about others that seems irrelevant to Wilson's life, frequently lurching from idea to idea with no logical transition. The book seems more a collection of other people's memories than a coherent analysis of Wilson's life and work. However, it does contain a wealth of information gleaned from Wilson's private papers and diaries and from correspondence and interviews with those who knew him. Comprehensive American literature collections will probably need this book; others may want to wait for a better-written study.-Judy Mimken, Boise, Id.

Library Journal

ilson--ever-curious, erudite, and eloquent--was a pivotal and prodigious force in the coalescence of the modern sensibility. Author of hundreds of essays and reviews and 50 books, Wilson was associated with all the major literary magazines of his day, knew every writer of import, and developed fresh interests and sparked controversies right up to the end of his productive life. This groundbreaking study completes Meyers' trilogy of portraits of American literary giants, which includes his book on Hemingway and last year's superb biography of Fitzgerald. A proficient and prolific literary scholar and biographer, Meyers is as adept at explicating Wilson's often traumatic conflict over being a critical rather than a creative writer as he is at describing Wilson's heavy drinking, contentious personality, and rampant sexuality. Wilson, a man who was both charged with obscenity and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, loved books, languages, women, and sex and "never met a foot he didn't like." Meyers introduces Wilson's many lovers, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, and all four of his wives, including the revengeful Mary McCarthy, with evident relish and covers all of Wilson's intellectual and erotic territory with an eye to his tremendous influence and independence of spirit.

Donna Seaman