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Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s

The Shores of Light | Axel’s Castle | uncollected reviews More

Edited by Lewis M. Dabney

“One cannot turn the pages of this heavy and handsome set, produced by The Library of America, without a sense of [Edmund Wilson’s] mass and weight and gravitas.” — Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News The long, hard-fought campaign that led to The Library of America’s founding
October 4, 2017

Interviews Lewis Dabney on Edmund Wilson, “a storyteller, a master of exposition and compressed intellectual analysis”
December 28, 2015

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With this inaugural volume of what will be a series devoted to Edmund Wilson’s work, The Library of America pays tribute to the writer who first conceived the idea of a publishing series dedicated to “bringing out in a complete and compact form the principal American classics.” Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s presents Wilson in the extraordinary first phase of his career, participating in a cultural renaissance and grappling with the crucial issues of his era.

The Shores of Light (1952) is Wilson’s magisterial assemblage of early reviews, sketches, stories, memoirs, and other writings into a teeming panorama of America’s literary life in a period of exuberant expansion and in the years of political and economic strife that followed. Wilson traces the emergence of a new American writing as he reviews the work of Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder, and many others, including his close friends F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Little escapes his notice: burlesque shows and Henry James, Soviet theater and the magic of Harry Houdini, the first novels of Malraux and the rediscovery of Edgar Allan Poe.

Axel’s Castle (1931), his pioneering overview of literary modernism, includes penetrating studies of Yeats, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and others. For several generations this book has stood as an indispensable companion to some of the crucial turning points in modern literature. Both these classic works display abundantly Wilson’s extraordinary erudition and unquenchable curiosity, his visionary grasp of larger historical meanings, his gift for acute psychological portraiture, and the matchless suppleness and lucidity of his prose. For Wilson, there are no minor subjects; every literary occasion sparks writing that is witty, energetic, and alive to the undercurrents of his time.

In addition this volume includes a number of uncollected reviews from the same period, including discussions of H. L. Mencken, Edith Wharton, and Bernard Shaw.

Lewis M. Dabney, volume editor, is the author of Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature and the editor of Wilson’s last journal, The Sixties, and of Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections. He is a professor of English at the University of Wyoming.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation.

Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s is kept in print by a gift from teh Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

The Shores of Light
Prologue, 1952: Christian Gauss as a Teacher of Literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mr. E. A. Robinson’s Moonlight
Two Novels of Willa Cather
Ezra Pound’s Patchwork
Wallace Stevens and E. E. Cummings
Byron in the Twenties
Late Violets from the Nineties
Greenwich Village in the Early Twenties
Sherwood Anderson’s Many Marriages
Ring Lardner’s American Characters
Eugene O’Neill and the Naturalists
The New American Comedy
A Vortex in the Nineties: Stephen Crane
Emergence of Ernest Hemingway
Imaginary Dialogues
Gilbert Seldes and the Popular Arts
Houdini
Poe at Home and Abroad
The Tennessee Poets
Muses Out of Work
Upton Sinclair’s Mammonart
The Pilgrimage of Henry James
The All-Star Literary Vaudeville
The Critics: A Conversation
Pope and Tennyson
A Letter to Elinor Wylie
Firbank and Beckford
A Preface to Persius
Burlesque Shows
E. E. Cummings’s Him
A Great Magician
Mencken’s Democratic Man
Woodrow Wilson at Princeton
American Heroes: Fremont and Frick
The Sportsman’s Tragedy
A Poet of the Pacific
Art Young
Greenwich Village at the End of the Twenties
The Critic Who Does Not Exist
A Weekend at Ellerslie
Thornton Wilder
The Death of Elinor Wylie
Burton Rascoe
Signs of Life: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Dostoevsky Abroad
Citizen of the Union
Virginia Woolf and the American Language
Dos Passos and the Social Revolution
T. S. Eliot and the Church of England
Dahlberg, Dos Passos and Wilder
Notes on Babbitt and More
Sophocles, Babbitt and Freud
“H. C.”
The Nietzschean Line
Te Literary Consequences of the Crash
The Economic Interpretation of Wilder
Schnitzler and Philip Barry
Koseph de Maistre
An Appeal to Progressives
The Literary Class War
C. L. Dodgson: The Poet-Logician
Lytton Strachey
The Satire of Samuel Butler
André Malraux
Gertrude Stein Old and Young
Mr. Wilder and the Middle West
The Literary Worker’s Polonius
The Classics on the Soviet Stage
Letter to the Russians about Hemingway
Talking United States
American Critics, Left and Right
It’s Terrible! It’s Ghastly! It Stinks
The Oxford Boys Becalmed
Prize-Winning Blank Verse
“Give That Beat Again”
Dream Poetry
“Cousin Swift, You Will Never Be a Poet”
Peggy Bacon: Poet with Pictures
Twilight of the Expatriates
The Pleasures of Literature
Cold Water on Bakunin
Shut Up that Russian Novel
Marxism at the End of the Thirties
Epilogue, 1952: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Axel’s Castle
Symbolism
W. B. Yeats
Paul Valéry
T. S. Eliot
Marcel Proust
James Joyce
Gertrude Stein
Axel and Rimbaud

Uncollected Reviews
H. L. Mencken
The Poetry of Drouth (The Waste Land)
Edith Wharton
A Guide to Gertrude Stein
Bernard Shaw Since the War
W. B. Yeats

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ISBN: 9781598530131 958 pages

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N° 176 Library of America Series

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