Edmund Wilson
Subtitle: a biography
By: Jeffrey Meyers.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 554
ISBN-13: 9780395689936
Subjects: Wilson, Edmund, 1895-1972.; Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography.; Critics -- United States -- Biography.
Description: This pioneering life of Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) completes the trilogy on modern American writers that Jeffrey Meyers began with his biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Wilson, whom Gore Vidal called "America's best mind," had extraordinarily wide interests that ranged far beyond literature.

He wrote about art, theater, music, film, and popular culture as well as political events, foreign travel, the revolutionary tradition in Europe, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Zuni and Iroquois Indians, the American Civil War, the culture and politics of Canada. He was a master of the biographical essay and the autobiographical memoir and was the greatest diarist of his time.

. Wilson's life was as interesting as his books and, in its own way, as romantic and chaotic as Fitzgerald's. He lived in bohemian poverty in the 1920s and '30s, suffered a nervous breakdown and the tragic death of his second wife, had three other wives (including Mary McCarthy), attracted an astonishing number of beautiful mistresses (including Edna St. Vincent Millay), and was a compulsive chronicler of his own sexual adventures.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 535-540) and index.
"A Peter Davison book."
Table of contents: title: Red bank, 1895-1907; title: The Hill school and Princeton, 1908-1916; title: War, 1916-1919; title: Vanity Fair and Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1919-1921; title: The New Republic and Ted Paramore, 1921-1922; title: Mary Blair, 1923-1926; title: Nervous breakdown, 1927-1929; title: Margaret Canby, 1930-1932; title: Marxism and Russia, 1932-1935; title: Mistresses, 1936-1937; title: Mary McCarthy, 1938-1945; title: Wellfleet, 1940-1942; title: At the New Yorker, 1943-1944; title: Postwar Europe and Mamaine Paget, 1945; title: Elena Thornton, 1946-1949; title: Memoirs of Hecate County, 1946-1948; title: Talcottville, 1950-1953; title: The Dead Sea scrolls, 1954-1956; title: Fighting the IRS, 1957-1958; title: Harvard, 1959-1962; title: Europe and Wesleyan, 1963-1965; title: Quarrel with Nabokov, 1965-1966; title: The Middle East and the MLA, 1967-1969; title: The dark defile, 1970-1972