Edmund Wilson

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Edmund Wilson (May 8, 1895 - June 12 1972) was an American writer, noted chiefly for his literary criticism. He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and educated at Princeton. He began his writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun, and served in the army during the First World War. He was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920 and 1921, and later served on the staffs of the New Republic and The New Yorker.

Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931) was a sweeping survey of Symbolism and Arthur Rimbaud, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (author of Axel), W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Wilson was interested in modern culture as a whole, and many of his writings go beyond the realm of pure literary criticism. In his book To the Finland Station, he studied the course of European socialism, culminating in the arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station of Saint Petersburg to lead the Bolshevik Revolution. Wilson's early works are heavily influenced by the ideas of Freud and Marx, reflecting his deep interest in their work.

He was a close friend of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and edited his final book for posthumous publication, and also a friend of Vladimir Nabokov, with whom he corresponded extensively and whose writing he introduced to Western audiences. His wife, Mary McCarthy, was also well-known for her literary criticism, and they co-operated on numerous works before their divorce.

Wilson's critical works helped foster public appreciation for U.S. novelists Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Fitzgerald.

Wilson was also an outspoken critic of U.S. Cold War policies. He failed to pay his income tax from 1946 to 1955 and was subsequently hounded by the Internal Revenue Service. In his essay The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest (1963), Wilson argues that, as a result of competitive militarization against the Soviet Union, the civil liberties of Americans were being paradoxically infringed upon under the guise of defense from Communism.

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