The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960-1972

The Notebooks and Diaries of Edmund Wilson

by Edmund Wilson

Disintinguished literary critic Edmund Wilson's extraordinary record comes to a fitting culmination in The Sixties, the last of his posthumously published journals, a personal history that is also a brilliant social comedy and an anatomy of our times.

Genres: Diary, Nonfiction, Autobiography, Memoir

968 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1993

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

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.

It is difficult to admit, but over the last 170 pages I felt like the great Wilde, impatient with the fate of Little Nell. This is incredibly insightful, we see Wilson at life's end, surveying his prior opinions, his friendships and his accomplishments. He travels to Hungary, to Israel and Jordan. He spends time in both Italy and France and imagines more than remembers both as they were forty years prior.

He also becomes incredibly bitchy. I understand, I myself am aging but some restraint would've been welcome if only for the sake of novelty. His body aches and doesn't function, including his genitals and sphincter. He meets crass people everywhere. The food is always bad. There are draughts. And the IRS won't leave him alone. There are haunted images of him in crumbling upstate New York mansion alone drinking champagne and reading Balzac. This journal certainly doesn't disprove such portraits. If anything it offers details which the discreet observer might forsake.

Yet he hangs out with Auden all the time. He complains he's drinking excessively but he can't sleep when he doesn't. There's Harry Levin, Robert Lowell, Dawn Powell, Isaiah Berlin and less often James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Mike Nichols and even Jackie Kennedy. Stravinsky struts on stage, dazzles and disappears. There are obviously disparate goals when tackling something of this magnitude. I'd like to think I was satisfied.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wilson was the best American critic of the twentieth century. In the twenties and thirties, he was one of the first mainstream critics to write serious studies of authors like Joyce, Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. He was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He became his literary executor.

He wrote on an amazing range of subjects. He wrote book length studies on subjects including the Dead Sea Scrolls, American Civil War literature, the sources of Communist thought, and the cultural life of Canada. His essays, gathered together in multiple large collections, had even a wider range. It is hard to find an American or English writer he did not consider, and his essays covered huge swaths of economics, politics and popular culture.

Wilson prided himself on being a journalist. He published in The New Republic, Nation, The New Yorker and an array of other publications. There was nothing academic about his style. He wrote in a clear forceful manner. He was a master at clearly describing very complicated or nuanced issues.

He kept a journal during most of his professional life. He used it as a diary, as a way to work out ideas, as a first draft for pieces and as a way to note scenes or vignettes he wanted to save. Much of the material in the journals was recycled into his published works. The journals were published in volumes organized by decades, from the twenties to the sixties.

This volume is subtitled "The Last Journal, 1960 - 1972" He died in 1972 at the age of 77. There is a melancholy undertone to this volume as he becomes more and more conscious of his old age. At the same time, the Journal documents an amazingly active life. Until his last several years, Wilson lived in a swirl of cocktail parties, international travel, award ceremonies and dinners with the high and mighty.

Wilson knew everyone in the intellectual world. He socializes with Arthur Schlesinger, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jackie Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, and a hundred more big names. He and his wife are invited to a state dinner in the White House with the Kennedys and the French Premier.

I enjoyed this volume, but not as much as the previous ones, because there was more name dropping and less discussion or insight into his work. During most of the decade he was working on "Upstate", a memoir of his family home in upstate New York and a portrait of the people in the town. He tried to spend a good chunk of each summer up there. One of the running stories in this volume is the annual fight with his wife because she did not see the allure of the upstate area. She preferred to stay in their home in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. My sympathies are with her.

All of these journals are forthright about sex. Wilson sized up almost every woman he met. He almost always comments on the body of any new woman. In his younger days he had multiple affairs. Even to the end of his life he is feeling up and making out with any woman who will let him. He describes the encounters in uncomfortable detail.

He had an amazing range of interests. He was a serious student of magic and performed any time he could get an audience. As he got older it got harder to do coin and card sleight of hand, so he started working with silks. He was a fan of puppetry and collected Punch and Judy puppets. He as an aficionado of strip clubs and had firm opinions on what made a good show.

He had strong opinions. Elizabeth Taylor "is the most banal woman imaginable". Robert Frost was "the most boring writer in America." Occasionally he indulges in the bane of all diarists and describes his dream in detail.

Overall, this volume has the melancholy feel of a strong, active, brilliant man trying frantically to hold off old age with activity but, as he notes;

"A feeling, the older I get-which I never expected to have-that earthly matters are hardly worth the effort. I've seen the best and worst that people can do, and I no longer have my old curiosity, sympathetic or antipathetic emotions. Soon I'll be fading out of it, why bother to read books, meet people, travel to foreign countries? "

[Trudy Ferrer · Rating 4 out of 5]

disfavor the word ‘polyglot’ but absolutely love that he devoured multiple languages.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last of Wilson’s decades, a mix of writer’s notebook, name dropping, and frank observations of his and other people’s bodies.

[Peter Strauss · Rating 4 out of 5]

See my notes on Wilson's Upstate for my take on his diaries if you are interested.