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Classics and Commercials
Hugely entertaining, informative bumper bundle of articles on contemporary (1920s onwards) literature; puffs and polemics, always lively and well-argued, in quick succession.
534 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1950
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53 people want to read
About the author
Edmund Wilson
291 books152 followersLibrarian 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 23, 2023
This is the collected literary criticism of Edmund Wilson in the 1940s. It is roughly chronologically arranged. He starts with a July 1940 piece criticizing Archibald MacLeish, the new Librarian of Congress, because he had suggested that authors should censor themselves as part of the upcoming war for Western Civilization. He ends with a December 1949 appreciation of the English novelist, Ronald Firbank. Most of the pieces were originally published in The New Yorker, some in The New Republic.
Wilson has spectacular breadth as a critic. This collection includes detailed and well thought out considerations of Jane Austen, detective stories, Joyce's "Finnegans Wake", Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, Thackery and much more. Some of the pieces discuss authors who are fairly obscure these days. Who still reads Octave Mirbeau, George Grosz or Angelica Balanoff? However, Wilson is the John McPhee of literary critics. He can make almost any book interesting.
He has a section called "The Boys in the Back Room" which is brilliant. His theory is that many of the serious American novelists of the 30s and 40s were strongly influenced by Ernest Hemingway. He discusses James M. Cain, John O'Hara, William Saroyan, and John Steinbeck and explains how each of them started from the Hemingway style and made their own changes.
Wilson has a clear and classical style which he can play with. He can drop a nice turn of phrase. Hemingway "is pugnacious almost to the point of madness." or, on Agatha Christie's novels, "You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out...".
Wilson has no use for most popular literature. He trashes horror stories and detective stories, including the critic's darlings, Chandler and Hammett. He reviews the best seller of the decade, "The Robe" by Lloyd C. Davis. He opines that it is difficult "to imagine any literate person with even the faintest trace of literary taste could ever get through more than two pages of it for pleasure."
He is judiciously enthusiastic about Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was his friend, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Edith Wharton and the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Wilson read an astounding amount. It was not unusual for him to read nine or ten novels for an eight-page review of an author. At times he succumbs to the reviewer trap of long plot summaries. He also has a tendency at times to lapse into "fine writing" for its own sake.
It would not be possible these days to support yourself writing literary criticism as Wilson did. These days literary critics are either academics or journalist who dabble in it. Wilson was fascinated by things, books, people, ideas and he had the very rare skill of saying intelligent things about all of it and getting paid for it.
Wilson has spectacular breadth as a critic. This collection includes detailed and well thought out considerations of Jane Austen, detective stories, Joyce's "Finnegans Wake", Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, Thackery and much more. Some of the pieces discuss authors who are fairly obscure these days. Who still reads Octave Mirbeau, George Grosz or Angelica Balanoff? However, Wilson is the John McPhee of literary critics. He can make almost any book interesting.
He has a section called "The Boys in the Back Room" which is brilliant. His theory is that many of the serious American novelists of the 30s and 40s were strongly influenced by Ernest Hemingway. He discusses James M. Cain, John O'Hara, William Saroyan, and John Steinbeck and explains how each of them started from the Hemingway style and made their own changes.
Wilson has a clear and classical style which he can play with. He can drop a nice turn of phrase. Hemingway "is pugnacious almost to the point of madness." or, on Agatha Christie's novels, "You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out...".
Wilson has no use for most popular literature. He trashes horror stories and detective stories, including the critic's darlings, Chandler and Hammett. He reviews the best seller of the decade, "The Robe" by Lloyd C. Davis. He opines that it is difficult "to imagine any literate person with even the faintest trace of literary taste could ever get through more than two pages of it for pleasure."
He is judiciously enthusiastic about Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was his friend, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Edith Wharton and the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Wilson read an astounding amount. It was not unusual for him to read nine or ten novels for an eight-page review of an author. At times he succumbs to the reviewer trap of long plot summaries. He also has a tendency at times to lapse into "fine writing" for its own sake.
It would not be possible these days to support yourself writing literary criticism as Wilson did. These days literary critics are either academics or journalist who dabble in it. Wilson was fascinated by things, books, people, ideas and he had the very rare skill of saying intelligent things about all of it and getting paid for it.
October 5, 2025
I inherited Classics and Commercials from my late father's library, along with Shores of Light and To the Finland Station (neither of which I've yet read). I thought the book might be a good survey of the period, with his several occasional essays and reviews from the 1940s gathered into one volume.
Classics and Commercials proved good reading and offered a good deal about his own life, as well as delineating characters/authors whose names have failed to last into the 21st century. Amongst good commentary on established writers like Kafka, Joyce, Wharton, Huxley, Fitzgerald, Waugh, Katherine Anne Porter, Nabokov, Samuel Johnson, Thackeray, Saroyan, Wilde, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Sartre, and Faulkner, there are pieces about now lesser lights such as Max Beerbohm, Thomas Love Peacock, George Saintsbury, Somerset Maugham, Dorothy Parker, Salvador Dali (as a writer), John O'Hara, James M. Cain, Agatha Christie, Louis Bromfield, Max Eastman, Archibald MacLeish, Van Wyck Brooks, and Angelica Balabanoff.
There are also essays on mystery and horror novels as particular genres, as well as reminiscences about good friends and acquaintances.
In all, Classics and Commercials was a diverting collection, each chapter relatively short, each exhibiting a consummate critical intelligence. One thing that I came away with, which realization came early in my reading of Wilson's commentary, was how infallible his opinion seemed. How, I marvelled, can he make such stark pronouncements about the quality of some writer's work? While I quiver to make even a middling summation of a novel or an author, Wilson can state without equivocation what is good, fair, or trash. It's entertaining being in the company of such assurance.
Classics and Commercials proved good reading and offered a good deal about his own life, as well as delineating characters/authors whose names have failed to last into the 21st century. Amongst good commentary on established writers like Kafka, Joyce, Wharton, Huxley, Fitzgerald, Waugh, Katherine Anne Porter, Nabokov, Samuel Johnson, Thackeray, Saroyan, Wilde, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Sartre, and Faulkner, there are pieces about now lesser lights such as Max Beerbohm, Thomas Love Peacock, George Saintsbury, Somerset Maugham, Dorothy Parker, Salvador Dali (as a writer), John O'Hara, James M. Cain, Agatha Christie, Louis Bromfield, Max Eastman, Archibald MacLeish, Van Wyck Brooks, and Angelica Balabanoff.
There are also essays on mystery and horror novels as particular genres, as well as reminiscences about good friends and acquaintances.
In all, Classics and Commercials was a diverting collection, each chapter relatively short, each exhibiting a consummate critical intelligence. One thing that I came away with, which realization came early in my reading of Wilson's commentary, was how infallible his opinion seemed. How, I marvelled, can he make such stark pronouncements about the quality of some writer's work? While I quiver to make even a middling summation of a novel or an author, Wilson can state without equivocation what is good, fair, or trash. It's entertaining being in the company of such assurance.
October 27, 2019
This volume is Wilson's collected essays for various publications during the 1940s. I admit that I skimmed some of these if they didn't hold my interest. This has nothing to do with Wilson's writing, as I do enjoy reading him (otherwise I would not continue to look at these anthologies), but some of the books he's discussing are not to my taste. It is interesting to see what was popular at the time, and whether or not the years have been kind to that particular author. Also of note is his opinions on detective novels (not just Doyle, but Christie and others; there are several essays on these) and H.P. Lovecraft (not his cup of tea).
April 19, 2018
These are short articles, mostly book reviews from magazines like The New Republic and The New Yorker. Even the pieces on “classics” are in response to some then-current book, such as J. Dover Wilson's The Fortunes of Falstaff or Speaking of Jane Austen by G. B. Stern and Shelia Kaye-Smith. Some of the contemporary writers he covers are now unknown, at least by me, such as Hans Otto Storm and Louis Bromfield (“…it was generally said of him that he was definitely second-rate. Since then, by unremitting industry and a kind of stubborn integrity that seems to make it impossible for him to turn out rubbish without thoroughly believing in it, he has gradually made his way to the fourth rank, where his place is now secure.”); others, such as John Steinbeck and Evelyn Waugh are now classics in their own right. The deaths of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West, occurring one day apart (December 21 & 22, 1940; I never realized that), are freshly painful news.
This line from a 1944 review of The Portable Dorothy Parker sums up both the time-bound and timeless appeal of these pieces:
Edmund Wilson in 1945 on H. P. Lovecraft:
This line from a 1944 review of The Portable Dorothy Parker sums up both the time-bound and timeless appeal of these pieces:
Yet it, too, this collected volume, has a value derived from rarity – a rarity like that steel penknives, good erasers and real canned sardines, articles of which the supply has almost given out and of which one is only now beginning to be aware how excellent the quality was.
Edmund Wilson in 1945 on H. P. Lovecraft:
The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art Lovecraft was not a good writer. The fact that his verbose and undistinguished style has been compared to Poe's is only one of the many sad signs that almost nobody any more pays any real attention to writing. I have never yet found in Lovecraft a single sentence that Poe could have written, though there are some — not at all the same thing — that have evidently been influenced by Poe. (It is to me more terrifying than anything in Lovecraft that Professor T. O. Mabbott of Hunter College, who has been promising a definitive edition of Poe, should contribute to the Lovecraft marginalia a tribute in which he asserts that “Lovecraft is one of the few authors of whom I can honestly say that I have enjoyed every word of his stories," and goes on to make a solemn comparison of Lovecraft's work with Poe's.) One of Lovecraft’s worst faults is his incessant effort to work up the expectations of the reader by sprinkling his stories with such adjectives as ‘horrible," “terrible," “frightful," “awesome," “eerie," “weird," “forbidden," “unhallowed," “unholy," ‘blasphemous," ‘hellish" and “infernal." Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words — especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews