FROM THE PUBLISHER

From the jazz age to the Nixon years, Edmund Wilson was an intrepid critic, historian, journalist, and creative writer who communicated in the voice of the public intellectual with a general audience and with international peers including Isaiah Berlin and Vladimir Nabokov. This new, revised edition of a 1985 New York Times Notable Book is about Wilson's passions: his commitment to the writer's craft, his contempt for power politics in his time and in history, his appetite for ancient and modern languages and literatures, and his many loves and eccentricities. Moving from his 1920s days as a cultural journalist to his 1930s period as a reporter on Depression America to his later years of relentless research and writings on the Civil War, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the panorama of his long life in literature, Edmund Wilson Revisited analyzes the books and opinions that have made Wilson a landmark figure. Chapters devoted to literary ideas, reporting, revolutionary politics, and personal philosophy reveal grand patterns of a writer's career as they follow his life across the century. Readers will discover Wilson's renaissance outreach as he explored Iroquois Indian customs, Hebrew texts, Marx and Engels, and the work of famous friends such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many other writers whom he brought into focus and championed.

FROM THE CRITICS

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