Edmund Wilson

• 1. Introduction

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  Edmund Wilson Jr. sent a postcard. Not to a friend, not to an editor, but to strangers who wrote asking for his time. The card listed, in exhaustive detail, every request he would not honor: reading manuscripts, delivering lectures, appearing on television, autographing books, answering questionnaires, contributing to panels, supplying photographs of himself. The list ran on for more than two dozen items. Wilson simply could not be bothered.

  This was not rudeness for its own sake. Wilson, born on the 8th of May 1895 in Red Bank, New Jersey, had a singular project: to read everything, think clearly about it, and write it down for a curious public. He worked at that project with a ferocity that left little room for anything else. He became chief book critic for The New Yorker, helped edit The New Republic, and wrote for The New York Review of Books. He won the National Book Award twice and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

  Joyce Carol Oates called his 1931 survey of modern literature a groundbreaking study. F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Wilson had known since their Princeton days, called him his intellectual conscience for twenty years. Vladimir Nabokov owed his introduction to Western readers partly to Wilson's advocacy, though the two men would eventually fall out in spectacular fashion.

  What made Wilson so important, and so difficult? The postcard gives one clue. But the fuller answer runs through Harlan County coal mines, a Paris-style library series he never lived to see, a tax rebellion against the federal government, and a dismissal of The Lord of the Rings as juvenile trash.

• 2. The Making of a Critic

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  At The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Wilson was already editing a literary magazine called The Record before he graduated in 1912. Princeton came next, where his circle included F. Scott Fitzgerald and the war poet John Allan Wyeth. The university years ran from 1912 to 1916, and by their end Wilson had formed friendships and a range of literary taste that would shape his career for decades.

  He started professional life as a reporter for the New York Sun, then served in the army with Base Hospital 36 from Detroit, Michigan, working later as a translator during the First World War. The war sharpened his eye for the relationship between literature and political reality. By 1920 he was managing editor of Vanity Fair, and by 1921 he had moved on to The New Republic as associate editor.

  His works influenced a notable cluster of novelists, including Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Floyd Dell, and Theodore Dreiser. He also served on the Dewey Commission, which set out to fairly evaluate the charges that led to the exile of Leon Trotsky, demonstrating an early willingness to place himself inside history's most contested arguments.

  In 1931, Wilson was physically run out of Harlan County, Kentucky, by nightriders while monitoring what he called the Coal War, alongside journalists Mary Heaton Vorse and Malcolm Cowley. That same year he published Axel's Castle, his sweeping survey of Symbolism covering writers from Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Valéry to T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. The proximity of the two events, the county road confrontation and the landmark book, captures the kind of critic Wilson was: one who moved between the archive and the street.

• 3. Friendship, Loyalty, Rivalry

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  Fitzgerald described Wilson as his intellectual conscience in the "Crack-Up" essays of 1936, a tribute spanning roughly twenty years of friendship that had begun at Princeton, where Fitzgerald was a year-and-a-half Wilson's junior. When Fitzgerald died at the age of 44 from a heart attack in December 1940, Wilson stepped in without fee to edit two posthumous books, The Last Tycoon and The Crack-Up, donating his editorial labor to help Fitzgerald's family.

  Vladimir Nabokov represented another long chapter. Wilson introduced Nabokov's writing to Western audiences, and the two men exchanged extensive correspondence. The friendship ultimately fractured over two literary disagreements. Wilson responded coolly to Nabokov's Lolita, and then delivered a public attack on what he considered Nabokov's eccentric translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Neither man retreated.

  Wilson was also a friend of the novelist and playwright Susan Glaspell and of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. He helped shape public appreciation for William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, and he argued for a reassessment of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. His personal relationship with the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was tested when his 1929 novel I Thought of Daisy portrayed her as a character named Rita Cavanaugh; they recovered from the falling-out and remained friends for the rest of their lives.

  He also wrote many letters to Anaïs Nin criticizing her surrealistic style, which he considered opposed to the realism he valued, and concluded one such exchange by proposing marriage, adding that he would teach her to write. Nin took this as an insult, which by most readings it plainly was.

• 4. The Contrarian in Print

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  Wilson's essay on H. P. Lovecraft, titled "Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous," condemned Lovecraft's tales outright as hackwork. His verdict on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was no warmer; Wilson called it juvenile trash and wrote that Tolkien had little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form. These were not passing remarks.

  He had earlier demolished W. Somerset Maugham in notably vehement terms, and later admitted, with something close to satisfaction, that he had not bothered to read the three novels most often considered Maugham's finest: Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, and The Razor's Edge.

  Yet this same critic who dismissed Tolkien in print also wrote To the Finland Station in 1940, a careful intellectual history tracing European socialism from Jules Michelet's 1824 discovery of the ideas of Vico through to Vladimir Lenin's 1917 arrival at the Finland Station of Saint Petersburg. The book took a subject that most literary critics avoided entirely and gave it sustained, serious treatment.

  Oates noted that Wilson encroached fearlessly on areas reserved for academic experts: early Christianity in The Dead Sea Scrolls, published in 1955; Native American civilization in Apologies to the Iroquois in 1960; and the American Civil War in Patriotic Gore in 1962. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Iroquois, the Confederacy and the Union these were not natural territory for a New Yorker book critic. Wilson went there anyway, and readers followed.

• 5. Tax Resistance and Cold War Dissent

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  From 1946 to 1955, Wilson refused to pay his federal income taxes. The Internal Revenue Service eventually investigated. After a settlement was reached, Wilson owed a $25,000 fine rather than the original $69,000 the IRS had sought, and he received no prison time.

  His 1963 book The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest laid out his reasoning. Wilson argued that competitive militarization against the Soviet Union was paradoxically eroding the civil liberties of Americans under the pretext of defending them. The same logic led him to oppose the Vietnam War.

  John F. Kennedy selected Wilson to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but Wilson did not collect it in person. On the 6th of December 1963, President Lyndon Johnson officially awarded the medal in Wilson's absence. Wilson's opinion of Johnson was, by every account, strongly negative. When historian Eric F. Goldman, writing on Johnson's behalf, invited Wilson to read from his work at a White House Festival of the Arts in 1965, Goldman later wrote that Wilson declined with a brusqueness he had never encountered before or after from anyone invited in the name of the President and First Lady.

  For the academic year 1964-65, Wilson accepted a fellowship on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University. He also received the Edward MacDowell Medal from The MacDowell Colony in 1964 for outstanding contributions to American culture. The tax resistance, the declined White House invitation, and the accepted academic fellowship all fit the same pattern: Wilson engaged with institutions on his own terms, or not at all.

• 6. A Library He Never Saw

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  Wilson had spent years lobbying for an American equivalent of France's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, a series publishing national classics in authoritative editions. He wanted the same thing for the United States. He did not live to see it.

  Wilson died on the 12th of June 1972 at the age of 77. His family's summer home at Talcottville, New York, known as Edmund Wilson House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places the following year, in 1973.

  The Library of America series launched in 1982, ten years after his death, through the efforts of Jason Epstein. Wilson's own writing entered the series in two volumes published in 2007. The institution he had imagined, and championed, and would not live to hold in his hands, eventually included his work among the American classics it was built to preserve.