Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s

by Edmund Wilson, Lewis M. Dabney (Editor)

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 30s" presents 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

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, American, Literature, Books About Books, Criticism

1025 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 2007

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. See also physicist Edmund Wilson.

Edmund Wilson Jr. was a towering figure in 20th-century American literary criticism, known for his expansive intellect, stylistic clarity, and commitment to serious literary and political engagement. Over a prolific career, Wilson wrote for Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, shaping the critical conversation on literature, politics, and culture. His major critical works—such as Axel's Castle and Patriotic Gore—combined literary analysis with historical insight, and he ventured boldly into subjects typically reserved for academic specialists, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, Native American cultures, and the American Civil War.
Wilson was also the author of fiction, memoirs, and plays, though his influence rested most strongly on his literary essays and political writing. He was instrumental in promoting the reputations of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, and many others. Despite his friendships with several of these authors, his criticism could be unflinching, even scathing—as seen in his public dismissal of H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien. His combative literary style often drew attention, and his exacting standards for writing, along with his distaste for popular or commercial literature, placed him in a tradition of high-minded literary seriousness.
Beyond the realm of letters, Wilson was politically active, aligning himself at times with socialist ideals and vocally opposing Cold War policies and the Vietnam War. His principled refusal to pay income tax in protest of U.S. militarization led to a legal battle and a widely read protest book.
Wilson was married four times and had several significant personal and intellectual relationships, including with Fitzgerald and Nabokov. He also advocated for the preservation and celebration of American literary heritage, a vision realized in the creation of the Library of America after his death. For his contributions to American letters, Wilson received multiple honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His legacy endures through his extensive body of work, which remains a touchstone for literary scholars and general readers alike.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edmund Wilson includes in The Shores of Light, the first book contained in this volume, a piece called “The Literary Worker’s Polonius: A Brief Guide for Authors and Editors,” which addresses the duties and natures of editors, contributors, authors, reviewers, and the public. It reflects how much consideration he gave to how work should be produced and how it should be received, and also prompts one to wonder how he primarily identified himself among the groups considered, for, while I would certainly classify his work here as cultural criticism, he was a member of all those groups in certain spheres. In The Shores of Light, Wilson addresses all manner of culture artifacts—past writers, then-present writers, influences on then-present writers, cultural media and forms as wholes, individual entertainers such as Houdini, schools of thought, artistic movements, other critics—in all manner of forms—imagined dialogues and missives, eulogies, fictional sketches, exchanges of personal correspondence, autobiographical remembrances of his intersections with other notable people, dispatches from a hotspot neighborhood in a given era, or a single establishment on a single evening. Creating this patchwork cultural context of the times gives an additional depth of field to his criticism, allowing the works considered to be implicitly positioned among markers of the events and personages to which they responded.

He takes an expansive approach to his criticism, expanding from ostensible reviews of particular books to overviews and reviews of authors’ oeuvres, or tackling biographies and histories in such a way that his reviews approach brief biographies and histories themselves. It is no accident that his work tends to creating these broad contexts and wide scopes of inquiry; it is clear, by the end of The Shores of Light, that his interests lie in lives as a whole, the swing of historical circumstances, the rises and falls of movements and schools; he has his eye on arcs rather than fixed points, and is interested in individual works or moments largely for what they suggest about where art has been and where it is going. In Wilson’s dedication to the second book included here—Axel’s Castle—he mentions his “idea of what literary criticism ought to be—a history of man’s ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them,” and indeed, this book allows Wilson to more closely approach what seems like it might be his ideal form, exploring at length in essays the Symbolist movement and its influence on then-contemporary writers. tracing their lives and the development of their work;. He is able to delve at length into not just craft but process, exploring the achievement of aesthetic effects throughout careers.

Even that of his criticism which does not specifically address other critics seems to implicitly as a corrective and an indication of the form that criticism should take; witness the biting closer of a piece on Poe, in which Wilson, having demonstrated the linking, by Poe, of Romanticism and Symbolism, says, “We must not, however, expect that Poe should be admired or understood in his capacity of suspension across this chasm by critics who are hardly aware that either of its banks exists.” Much as Wilson rigorously pursues an ideal of criticism, he demands that the works he addresses also approach their ideal forms; he often openly demands better of those whose work he is reviewing. He has high standards and is only very rarely fully satisfied—it is one of the most refreshing aspects of this book that the bulk of his pieces express a certain ambivalence or degree of reservation, reflecting the reality that most artistic output is fitted to a bell curve (although Wilson’s thoroughness of examination can occasionally approach a checklist quality and result in comments that don’t quite felicitously fit into a review); he nearly always can find some merit and value, but just as nearly always can point to qualifications of that merit in the form of quibbles and shortcomings. As Wilson notes of a problem still pervasive today, “it is scarcely possible nowadays to tell the reviews from the advertising: both tend to convey the impression that masterpieces are being manufactured as regularly as new models of motor-cars.” Nevertheless, he is not afraid to, on occasion, deem a work a masterful one (such as in the case of Ulysses and À la recherche du temps perdu), though this doesn’t spare it notice of the flaws it may yet contain, which in turn don’t keep him from recognizing the overwhelming quality of the whole. Wilson never allows the imperfection of a discovery to keep him from expressing enthusiasm; Ernest Hemingway, in a reply to a personal letter from Wilson (not included) regarding a copy of Hemingway’s first published book at a time when it had not yet been reviewed in the States, Ernest Hemingway references Wilson’s status as an assessor of literary worth, and a strict one at that: “I am very glad you liked some of it. As far as I can think at the minute yours is the only critical opinion in the States I have any respect for.”

Wilson has a professionalism to his approach, and so a sort of code that he tries to live up to, but one gets the sense that his reactions can be somewhat checked or restrained, though this is not necessarily an unwelcome change from the current climate, where criticism tends heavily toward the definitive; he takes pains to qualify his commentary as necessary, once resulting in the belt-and-suspenders formulation “partly, no doubt, it would appear.” There is a fundamental modesty to Wilson’s presentation of his material; he notes revisions of opinions (at one point saying in a footnote, regarding an incorrect assertion, that “I have had to let this statement stand in order not to be in the position of suppressing my own past errors while perpetuating Mr. DeVoto’s) and includes rejoinders to his work (whether they had originally appeared in print or not), another way in which he adds context and dimensionality to his own work. His reviews can sometimes seem not to have endings, coming to a close rather abruptly and without flourish, but this almost seems fitting, as if has only judged his current response to a work at a given point of time, not wanting to impose an air of finality of opinion. On a few occasions, he assigns importance to trivialities or assumes limitations, though he is so forthright in the reasoning behind his assessments that one can cleanly sidestep these minor points and not let them obscure Wilson’s greater point. He generously, and rigorously, includes a great number of quotes from the material at hand, allowing the reader a chance to gauge the merit of his own criticism.

Wilson is quite incisive when it comes to exploring the craft of writing and how results are produced, pointing out disagreements of form and style, and of technique and material; even more impressive, he is able not only to analyze technique but to discern the underlying inspiration and motive behind given passages in a way that I haven’t seen elsewhere, in one such case demonstrating the inspiration that Thornton Wilder had taken from Proust, which Wilson had not seen commented upon previously. Through such a vast selection of his writing, we determine his values. He prizes a strong point of view, authenticity of perspective and emotion, and originality over the synthetic and the systematic; he thinks most highly of artists who seem to have a calling—what he once refers to as “the artist’s vocation”—as when he says that one poet’s work “has the mark of the authentic artist in that it does not derive from the desire to produce an impression for its own sake but pursues as its primary object what the writer feels and thinks.” He can be dismissive of work that seems effortless—he describes someone as “giving off his poems as spontaneously as perspiration and with as little application of the intellect”—but at the same time frowns upon that effort being worn too openly, in such a way that it feels like deliberate calculation than refined craftsmanship. He values clear writing in combination with clear thinking, a lyricism combined with emotional impact—knocking on the one hand expressionist drams that “have commended themselves to our interest on the basis of their artistic merits, and then have turned out to suffer from the primary disadvantage of being written by persons who could not write,” and on the other the work of a given author, “who writes so clearly, does not think any more clearly than any other dilettante of epicurean tastes who desires to figure as a champion of all the moral and aesthetic values without being willing to deal with the problem of how these values are created or lost”—and, in the lucidity of his own thought and the limpidity of his own writing, it shows.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writing a Goodreads-style review for such an intellectual critique as Edmund Wilson conjures the image of what exactly Wilson would make of this contemporary mode of literary discourse. It's easy to envision the same critique that cringed at "school essay" writing of many literary reviewers driven to apoplexy at the shallow tossed off thoughts of today.

However, Wilson's repeated exhortations to writers escaping their provincial perspectives makes me hope that Wilson could find something worthwhile in the Web 2.0 crowd-sourced production of opinion. What made Wilson most frustrating when, despite his advocacy for capturing the whole of America in writing, seems to write from a cartoonishly narrow perspective. This myopia is perhaps best captured when he writes "Persia, like Arcadia, is a country of which no one knows anything, we may be free, without fear of reprehension, to write anything of it we please; but that, in the case of Venice, we are certain to have among our readers many persons who have been there, and whom it will displease to find the scenes inappropriate or the manners reported inexactly." In this era of a panoply of voices such a claim would certainly be impossible.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

A man has withdrawn from the tumult of American life into the seclusion of a house in Baltimore. He is unmarried and has surrounded himself with three thousand books. From this point of vantage he watches the twentieth century with detached and ironic dismay. A not ungenial materialist, he reflects that all human activities are, after all, mainly physical in origin: inspiration is a function of metabolism; death is an acidosis; love is a biological phenomenon; idealism is insanity. But the body is capable of much enjoyment; why worry about its obvious supremacy? As long as there is Chicken a la Maryland and plenty of liquor from the boot-leggers, as long as it is possible to read Conrad and hear Bach and Beethoven occasionally, why should a man of aristocratic temperament be particularly disturbed about anything? Let the capitalist exploit the wage-slave and the wage-slave blow up the capitalist; let political charlatans and scoundrels pick the pockets of the Republic; let the women run the men to ground and the men break their hearts for the women; let the people go off to the wars and destroy each other by the billion. They can never rob Mencken of his sleep nor spoil a single dinner for him. Outside, it is all a question of Christianity and democracy, but Mencken does not believe in either, so why should he take part in the brawl? What has he to do with the mob except to be diverted by its idiocy? He may occasionally attend a political convention to gratify a "taste for the obscene" or entertain his speculative mind by predicting the next catastrophe, but, on the whole, the prodigious din and activity and confusion of the nation roars along without touching him particularly; it is all to him "but as the sound of lyres and flutes."

Something like this is the comic portrait which Mencken has painted of himself; he has even pretended that it is the character in which he prefers to be accepted. But there is, behind this comic mask, a critic, an evangelist and an artist; there is a mind of extraordinary vigor and a temperament of extraordinary interest, and neither of these has ever yet been examined as seriously as it should have been. Mencken has been left far too much to the rhapsodies of his disciples and the haughty sneers of his opponents. Indeed, he has assumed such importance as an influence in American thought that it is high time some one subjected him to a drastic full-length analysis. The present writer has only space for the briefest of suggestions.

[Paul Montag · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have just finished reading The Shores of Light, a book of essays by Edmund Wilson written in the 1920’s and 30’s. I do not think it, overall, as interesting as the other works of criticism of his that I read immediately before it: The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, and most especially, Classics and Commercials. This volume does not deal with literature straightaway as much as the other volumes do. There is nothing in The Shores of Light like the masterful and lengthy essays in The Wound and the Bow on Dickens and Kipling and Edith Wharton, except perhaps for an extremely moving portrait of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Wilson says that at one point in the 1930’s his focus turned heavily to politics, and most specifically, to the Russian Revolution, an interest which ended in producing one of his most profound works, To the Finland Station. When he is writing about literature in The Shores of Light, especially in the latter half, it is more apt to be about poets than prose writers. And when he is writing about prose writers, he is apt to cover the same ones more than once, like Hemingway and Thornton Wilder. As with any book of essays, some entries will interest the reader more than others. I was not overly fond of his fictional sketches that appeared periodically as interludes, and which he wrote especially for this volume, but on the other hand I was grateful for his introducing me to the art of Peggy Bacon, and for including a brief little essay about Swift’s poetry, which includes one of the most interesting poems I have ever read. But there aren’t quite as many little treasures to be found like this poem of Swift’s as one would expect in a book of this size coming from an author whose tastes are as eclectic and discerning as Wilson’s. This would just further go to show, I think, how much at this period he was writing about politics. One of the more interesting essays is one he wrote about the climate of magazine publishing of his day, and what respective editors and authors need to know in pursuit of that trade. There are 640 pages in The Shores of Light, and yet one feels somehow that there is not as much variety as in the other works mentioned above, all of which are shorter, in most cases much shorter. And yet, for all that, what makes The Shores of Light, despite its rather heavy-going title, such an exquisite delight to read is the excellent writing of Edmund Wilson, which is both magisterial and easy going, honest and with a contagious rhythm. I read all the above-mentioned works straight through in the Library of America series, adding up to a total of 1,550 pages. I have never read so many pages of criticism in a row as this. Perhaps one reason The Shores of Light impressed me the least of these works is because I was growing weary of critical writing. But what I had not grown weary of at all was Wilson’s writing style. From the first page to the last of these volumes, his prose was a delight to read. He writes freely, without concern for toeing any party line, whether literary or political. His vocabulary is large, and his sentences, while sometimes elaborate, are clean and clear, with a charm coming from his unique perspective. While I would do well, it would seem, to read some fiction after so many pages in a row of criticism, I wonder how much time should be allowed to pass before returning to another book of his for how much pleasure his writing gives me.

[Kurishin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've ever wondered why literary criticism became so esoteric in the 2nd half of the 20th century, this tome is part of the reason why. It's so good that in order to attempt to say something new about Tier I literature, you had to get esoteric. Wilson had gotten there ahead of you.
And, please, read this before Foucault or Derrida or others that would take you farther afield than concern with the text in question. This is actually enjoyable to read!

[Geoff]

Great find on the sale rack at Politics & Prose- best bookstore in DC. This thing's a monster, probably will be on the "currently-reading" shelf awhile...

[Fred R · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lighter than I had expected, and less focused.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful criticism full of wit and insight. A must for any serious student of literature.

[Sean]

Reading The Shores of Light.