Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature

Lewis Dabney lectures on his new book, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature.
From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy Era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history (Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and criticism that has outlasted many of its subjects. Wilson documented his unruly private life, a formative love affair with Edna St Vincent Millay, a tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and volatile friendships with Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, among others, in fiction and journals, but Lewis Dabney is the first writer to integrate the life and the work.

[@ColdChicago]

if twain, as howells said, was the "lincoln of our literature," wilson was lincoln to our critical life.

[@Sparrows1121]

Gonna buy this book. Because it takes balls to shittalk lotr i will say that. Love LOTR books and movies. But will buy this book Patriotic Gore in some weeks when i get paid.

[@WmThomasSherman]

Whatever his merits as a writer and critic otherwise, and I will grant he had significant merit,, all this gossip material really is worthless except to idle busy-bodies, and Wilson, as seen in his journals himself is no little to blame for it; often speaking about sex in there like a childish adolescent wanting to show off.

[@phuongngandao1486]

7:19

[@mikesnyder1788]

Very good presentation on the great Edmund Wilson!!! As a younger man I enjoyed his literary essays, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore. I miss those clever, laser sharp sentences and paragraphs and this has been a nice journey back to the days when I read some quality writers and thinkers.

[@jinmengpiao494]

7:13-8:44

[@alecias4703]

good video

[@alecias4703]

good video

[@alecias4703]

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