Edmund Wilson - A Life in Literature

Preface xi Introduction 3 PART ONE: Edmund Wilson, Jr. 1. 12 Wallace Street 11 2. "School-Days and Early Influences" 30 3. Literature Among the Playboys 38 4. World War I: 'The Others Stayed with Their Class" 53 PART TWO: The Twenties 5. Vanity Fair, Mencken, and Edna St. Vincent Millay 71 6. Coming of Age 85 7. Private Life 98 8. Literary and Cultural Criticism 115 9. Between the Acts: 1929 137 10. From Whitehead and Proust to Marx: I Thought of Daisy and Axel's Castle 149 PART THREE: On the Left 11. With Margaret Canby: Political Commitment and Tragedy 163 12. 314 East Fifty-third Street 183 13. The USSR in 1935 204 14. Trees and The Triple Thinkers 218 PART FOUR: "E.W. and M. McC." 15. A Literary Marriage Begins 235 16. The Writing and Acting of History: Wilson on Karl Marx 254 17. 1940: Wilson's Middle of the Journey 265 18. Wilson and McCarthy, 1942-1945 280 19. Memoir and Fiction, by Night and by Day 301 20. At The New Yorker and in England and Italy: Waugh, Silone, Santayana 311 PART FIVE: A Second Flowering 21. False Hopes and True: Enter Elena Mumm Thornton 331 22. Old Commitments and New 344 23. American Criticism and Portraiture at WeMeet, Princeton, and Talcottville 356 24. In the Old World 371 25. European Artists: Malraux, Beerbohm, and Stravinsky; Auden in America 382 26. Nabokov and Russian Literature 394 27. The Skeptic's Pilgrimage: Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls 408 28. A Reporter in Minority Communities 418 29. Patriotic Gore Reconsidered 431 PART SIX: "My Books Live, I Am Ceasing to Live" 30. Husband and Father 447 31. The Sixties and the Decade 468 32. The Last Ten Years: Criticism, Travel Writing, Upstate 487 33. Life Against Death 499 Epilogue, 2005 517 Notes 523 Acknowledgments 599 Index 603