Edmund Wilson - Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s : The Shores of Light/Axel's Castle/Uncollected Reviews

by Wilson, Edmund

• ISBN13: 9781598530131
• ISBN10: 1598530135
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-01
• Publisher: Penguin Group USA

Summary

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. With this volume and a companion volume devoted to the 30s and 40s--the first two entries in what will be a series devoted to 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 30spresents 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 Hemingway, Stevens, Cummings, Dos Passos, 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

Author Biography

LEWIS M. DABNEY, 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.

Table of Contents

Prologue, 1952: Christian Gauss as a Teacher of Literature	p. 11
F. Scott Fitzgerald	p. 30
Mr. E. A. Robinson's Moonlight	p. 37
Two Novels of Willa Cather	p. 40
Ezra Pound's Patchwork	p. 44
Wallace Stevens and E. E. Cummings	p. 48
Byron in the Twenties	p. 55
Late Violets from the Nineties	p. 63
Greenwich Village in the Early Twenties	p. 67
Sherwood Anderson's Many Marriages	p. 82
Ring Lardner's American Characters	p. 85
Eugene O'Neill and the Naturalists	p. 89
The New American Comedy	p. 94
A Vortex in the Nineties: Stephen Crane	p. 97
Emergence of Ernest Hemingway	p. 102
Imaginary Dialogues	p. 109
Gilbert Seldes and the Popular Arts	p. 133
Houdini	p. 148
Poe at Home and Abroad	p. 152
The Tennessee Poets	p. 162
Muses Out of Work	p. 166
Upton Sinclair's Mammonart	p. 178
The Pilgrimage of Henry James	p. 182
The All-Star Literary Vaudeville	p. 191
The Critics: A Conversation	p. 206
Pope and Tennyson	p. 211
A Letter to Elinor Wylie	p. 215
Firbank and Beckford	p. 219
A Preface to Persius	p. 222
Burlesque Shows	p. 228
E. E. Cummings's Him	p. 234
A Great Magician	p. 237
Mencken's Democratic Man	p. 242
Woodrow Wilson at Princeton	p. 246
American Heroes: Fremont and Frick	p. 267
The Sportsman's Tragedy	p. 278
A Poet of the Pacific	p. 283
Art Young	p. 288
Greenwich Village at the End of the Twenties	p. 293
The Critic Who Does Not Exist	p. 301
A Weekend at Ellerslie	p. 306
Thornton Wilder	p. 315
The Death of Elinor Wylie	p. 322
Burton Rascoe	p. 326
Signs of Life: Lady Chatterley's Lover	p. 331
Dostoevsky Abroad	p. 335
Citizen of the Union	p. 340
Virginia Woolf and the American Language	p. 345
Dos Passos and the Social Revolution	p. 350
T. S. Eliot and the Church of England	p. 355
Dahlberg, Dos Passos and Wilder	p. 360
Notes on Babbitt and More	p. 367
Sophocles, Babbitt and Freud	p. 381
"H. C."	p. 388
The Nietzschean Line	p. 395
The Literary Consequences of the Crash	p. 400
The Economic Interpretation of Wilder	p. 406
Schnitzler and Philip Barry	p. 409
Joseph de Maistre	p. 413
An Appeal to Progressives	p. 421
The Literary Class War	p. 434
C. L. Dodgson: The Poet-Logician	p. 439
Lytton Strachey	p. 448
The Satire of Samuel Butler	p. 453
Andre Malraux	p. 460
Gertrude Stein Old and Young	p. 467
Mr. Wilder and the Middle West	p. 477
The Literary Worker's Polonius	p. 482
The Classics on the Soviet Stage	p. 496
Letter to the Russians about Hemingway	p. 501
Talking United States	p. 512
American Critics, Left and Right	p. 520
It's Terrible! It's Ghastly! It Stinks	p. 537
The Oxford Boys Becalmed	p. 542
Prize-Winning Blank Verse	p. 546
"Give That Beat Again"	p. 552
Dream Poetry	p. 558
"Cousin Swift, You Will Never Be a Poet"	p. 564
Peggy Bacon: Poet with Pictures	p. 568
Twilight of the Expatriates	p. 571
The Pleasures of Literature	p. 575
Cold Water on Bakunin	p. 579
Shut Up that Russian Novel	p. 584
Marxism at the End of the Thirties	p. 592
Epilogue, 1952: Edna St. Vincent Millay	p. 601
Symbolism	p. 645
W. B. Yeats	p. 662
Paul Valery	p. 688
T. S. Eliot	p. 707
Marcel Proust	p. 734
James Joyce	p. 774
Gertrude Stein	p. 805
Axel and Rimbaud	p. 818
H. L. Mencken	p. 857
The Poetry of Drouth (The Waste Land)	p. 865
Edith Wharton	p. 872
A Guide to Gertrude Stein	p. 874
Bernard Shaw Since the War	p. 880
W. B. Yeats	p. 885
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