Bücher von Edmund Wilson

From one of the leading literary critics of his generation comes the first of Edmund Wilson's three novels, I thought of Daisy, published together with his short story "Galahad." Set in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, Edmund Wilson's I Thought of Daisy tells the coming of age story of a young man living a bohemian life in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, and of his heartfelt relationship with a chorus girl he meets at a party. Fictional sketches drawn from real-life literary figures are scattered throughout, including John Dos Passos and Wilson's lover, Edna St. Vincent Millay."What needs to be [said] is how good, if ungainly, Daisy is, how charmingly and intelligently she tells of the speakeasy days of a Greenwich Village as red and cozy as a valentine, of lamplit islands where love and ambition and drunkenness bloomed all at once. The fiction writer in Wilson was real, and his displacement is a real loss." - John Updike

Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer."

The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects contains some of Edmund Wilson's most significant and brilliant writings on topics and authors ranging from Pushkin, A. E. Housman, Flaubert, Henry James, Marxism, poetry and more.

"The truth is that the people of the United States are at the present time dominated and driven by two kinds of officially propagated fear: fear of the Soviet Union and fear of the income tax. These two terrors have been adjusted so as to complement one another and thus to keep the citizen of our free society under the strain of a double pressure from which he finds himself unable to escape -- like the man in the old Western story, who, chased into a narrow ravine by a buffalo, is confronted with a grizzly bear. If we fail to accept the tax, the Russian buffalo will butt and trample us, and if we try to defy the tax, the federal bear will crush us.""The 60,000 officials who are appointed to check on us taxpayers are checked on, themselves, it seems, by another group of agents set to watch them. And supplementing these officials -- since private citizens are paid by the Internal Revenue Service to report on other people's delinquencies, and their names of course are never revealed -- there is a whole host of amateur investigators... Does this kind of spying and delation differ much in its incitement to treachery from that which is encouraged in the Soviet Union?"

A Window on Russia is a collection of Edmund Wilson's papers on Russian writers and the Russian language (which he taught himself to read), written between 1943 and 1971. Writers discussed include Pushkin, Gogol, Chekov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, among others."In A Window on Russia, which Wilson modestly calls 'a handful of disconnected pieces, written at various times when I happened to be interested in the various authors,' we encounter that rare pleasure of entering a living world where the dead hand of academia never casts its shadow." - Kirkus Reviews

"A selection of ... literary articles written during the nineteen forties."

"In the best tradition of literary criticism… combines exact information with shrewd and searching penetration into the personal life of the artist."-The New York TimesWhere does artistic genius come from? Originally published in 1941, this classic work of literary critique by Edmund Wilson suggests an answer to that question with seven insightful essays, each one focusing on a different writer, each of which suffered some hardship or handicap that led to the creation of some of the most powerful works of literature. The first two studies, of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, cover each author's full body of work and reveal how in each case an unhappy childhood later resulted in mature artistic works later in their lives. Subsequent appraisals analyze the writings of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jacques Casanova, Edith Wharton, and Sophocles. Wilson's keen insights and analysis, weaving his thorough knowledge of history, biography, and psychology, led F. Scott Fitzgerald to call him "the literary conscience of my generation."The title The Wound and the Bow refers to the mythical story of Philoctetes, as recounted in the final essay. The legendary Greek archer was bitten by snake and then afflicted with an incurable, malodorous wound that would not heal. After first being banished, the injured hero was later sought out by his fellow warriors for his prowess with a magic bow, and his skill was ultimately key to the Greek victory at Troy.

"In the best tradition of literary criticism… combines exact information with shrewd and searching penetration into the personal life of the artist." -The New York TimesWhere does artistic genius come from? Originally published in 1941, this classic work of literary critique by Edmund Wilson suggests an answer to that question with seven insightful essays, each one focusing on a different writer, each of which suffered some hardship or handicap that led to the creation of some of the most powerful works of literature. The first two studies, of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, cover each author's full body of work and reveal how in each case an unhappy childhood later resulted in mature artistic works later in their lives. Subsequent appraisals analyze the writings of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jacques Casanova, Edith Wharton, and Sophocles. Wilson's keen insights and analysis, weaving his thorough knowledge of history, biography, and psychology, led F. Scott Fitzgerald to call him "the literary conscience of my generation."The title The Wound and the Bow refers to the mythical story of Philoctetes, as recounted in the final essay. The legendary Greek archer was bitten by snake and then afflicted with an incurable, malodorous wound that would not heal. After first being banished, the injured hero was later sought out by his fellow warriors for his prowess with a magic bow, and his skill was ultimately key to the Greek victory at Troy.