From Uncollected Edmund Wilson

Groth (Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time, 1989) and Castronovo (Edmund Wilson, 1984) have brought together here more than 50 pieces that Wilson (1895-1972) published in magazines dating from his student days at The Hill School in 1911 to 1959, when he was firmly established as a leading U.S. critic and author (To the Finland Station, 1940). Organized chronologically, the selections show Wilson's scholarship, the maturation of his keen, expressive voice and the emergence of his humanistic concerns. During the 1920s, his reviews, in part, dealt with his thoughts on classicism and the new literary modernism, reflected in an essay on poet T.S. Eliot. During the '30s, he was concerned with the Depression and expressed sympathy with the leftist ideals of novelist Theodore Dreiser. During the '40s and '50s, Wilson wrote extensively for the New Yorker, and several of his articles on 20th-century literary giants (Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce) are included here. A feast for Wilson devotees. (Oct.)