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Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s

The Triple Thinkers | The Wound and the Bow | Classics and Commercials | uncollected reviews More

Edited by Lewis M. Dabney

“Since the whole project was his idea, it is fitting that Edmund Wilson now finds himself among The Library of America’s roster of canonical authors. Wilson, our last great ‘man of letters,’ often behaved as though he were personally responsible for lifting the standards of American literary life to European levels.”
— The Wall Street Journal

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Overview

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

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Edmund Wilson was the dominant American literary critic from the 1920s until his death in 1972, but he was also far more than that: a chronicler of his times, a historian of ideas, a probing observer of himself and of the society around him.

Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s shows Wilson at the midpoint of his extraordinary career as critic and scholar, and includes in complete form three of his most significant books. The Triple Thinkers (1938, revised 1948) and The Wound and the Bow (1941) give us Wilson at the height of his powers, in a series of extended literary studies marked by his unique combination of criticism, biographical narrative, and psychological analysis. Here are his dazzling portraits of Pushkin and Flaubert, Dickens and Henry James, Kipling and Casanova, equally sensitive to historical context and his subjects’ inner lives; his scintillating reader’s guide to the mysteries of Finnegans Wake and his celebrated exploration of the nature of creativity through the figure of Sophocles’ wounded hero Philoctetes.

Classics and Commercials (1950) is Wilson’s gathering of the best of his reviews from the 1940s, a collection that exemplifies the range and omnivorousness of his interests. In the exact and fluent prose that makes him an unfailing delight to read, Wilson takes on everything from Gogol and Tolstoy to contemporaries like James M. Cain, Katherine Anne Porter, Dorothy Parker, and William Faulkner. Whether registering his qualms about detective novels, parsing the etiquette manuals of Emily Post, or paying tribute to the comic genius of Evelyn Waugh, Wilson turns any critical occasion into the highest kind of pleasure.

The volume is completed with a selection of uncollected reviews from this period, including Wilson’s observations on the work of William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, and Anaïs Nin.

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 1930s & 40s is kept in print by a gift from the Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

The Triple Thinkers
Mr. More and the Mithraic Bull
Is Verse a Dying Technique?
In Honor of Pushkin
A. E. Housman
The Politics of Flaubert
The Ambiguity of Henry James
John Jay Chapman
Bernard Shaw at Eighty
Marxism and Literature
Morose Ben Jonson
“Mr. Rolfe”
The Historical Interpretation of Literature

The Wound and the Bow
Dickens: The Two Scrooges
The Kipling That Nobody Read
Uncomfortable Casanova
Justice to Edith Wharton
Hemingway: Gauge of Morale
The Dream of H. C. Earwicker
Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow

Classics and Commercials
Archibald MacLeish and the Word
Van Wyck Brooks’s Second Phase
The Boys in the Back Room
Max Eastman in 1941
T. K. Whipple
The Antrobuses and the Earwickers
Alexander Woollcott of the Phalanx
The Poetry of Angelica Balabanoff
Mr. Joseph E. Davies as a Stylist
Thoughts on Being Bibliographed
Through the Embassy Window: Harold Nicholson
Kay Boyle and the Saturday Evening Post
The Life and Times of John Barrymore
The Art of Evelyn Waugh
John Mulholland and the Art of Illusion
What Became of Louis Bromfield
J. Dover Wilson on Falstaff
A Toast and a Tear for Dorothy Parker
A Treatise on Tales of Horror
A Guide to Finnegans Wake
A Novel by Salvador Dali
A Long Talk about Jane Austen
“You Can’t Do That To Me!” Shrilled Celia
Aldous Huxley in the World Beyond Time
Vladimir Nabokov on Gogol
Katherine Anne Porter
Brooks’s Age of Irving
Why Do People Read Detective Stories?
Bernard Shaw on the Training of a Statesman
Reýýxamining Dr. Johnson
Leonid Leonov: The Sophistication of a Formula
Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?
“Mr. Holmes, They Were The Footprints of a Gigantic Hound!”
Glenway Wescott’s War Work
A Cry from the Unquiet Grave
Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous
Thackeray’s Letters
Splendors and Miseries of Evelyn Waugh
George Saintsbury’s Centenary
Ambushing a Best-Seller
The Apotheosis of Somerset Maugham
William Saroyan and His Darling Old Providence
Oscar Wilde
George Grosz in the United States
An Old Friend of the Family: Thackeray
Gilbert Without Sullivan
George Saintsbury: Gourmet and Glutton
Books of Etiquette and Emily Post
A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Novelist and the Existentialist
The Musical Glasses of Peacock
Edith Wharton: A Memoir by an English Friend
The Sanctity of Baudelaire
Van Wyck Brooks on the Civil War Period
An Analysis of Max Beerbohm
The Original of Tolstoy’s Natasha
“The Most Unhappy Man on Earth”
William Faulkner’s Reply to the Civil-Rights Program
In Memory of Octave Mirbeau
A Revival of Ronald Firbank
Paul Rosenfeld: Three Phases

Uncollected Reviews
Return of Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Doubts and Dreams: Dangling Man and Under a Glass Bell
A Novel by Dawn Powell: My Home Is Far Away
Faintness of the Age of Thunder and Power of The Folded Leaf
Theodore Dreiser’s Quaker and Graham Greene’s Priest
Henry James and Auden in America

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