Edmund Wilson, Jr. -- The twenties -- On the left -- "E. W. and M. McC." -- A second flowering -- "My books live, I am ceasing to live."
Summary:
From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write classics of literary and intellectual history, reportage, and criticism that have outlasted many of their subjects. Wilson documented his unruly private life--a formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, a tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and volatile friendships--in openly erotic fiction and journals, but Dabney is the first biographer to integrate the life and work. Dabney traces the critic's intellectual development, from small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and shows why Wilson has remained--in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity--a model for young writers and intellectuals.--From publisher description.
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