HENRY BRANDON: When you write about literature, do politics influence your selection?
EDMUND WILSON: No. There are certain kinds of writers that are more congenial to me than others…
HENRY BRANDON: What do you think of the standards of literary criticism today?
EDMUND WILSON: I don’t think about those thing AT ALL! Literary criticism is a department of literature for me, and when I read literary critics I read them as literature; the others I can’t read at all. I never think of myself, for instance, as a literary critic; I think of myself simply as a writer and a journalist.
I write about things that interest me…
—from Conversations with Henry Brandon, 1968
On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Edmund Wilson
(1895–1972), Jeffrey Meyers has written the first full-length
biography of this remarkable writer.
It doesn’t come a moment too soon. If Wilson wasn’t the greatest
literary critic of his time—a distinction that, in my view,
belongs to T. S. Eliot—he was certainly the only American critic
whose work can be usefully compared to that of the leading novelists
and poets of his own generation. Yet, barely a quarter of
a century
after his death, Wilson’s books are largely unread and the man
himself looks more and more like the figure of a distant era. The
literary tradition that nurtured him and his
