Edmund Wilson’s America, by George H. Douglas (University Press of Kentucky, 254 pp., $23)
George H. Douglas, a professor at the University of Illinois, writes in defense of an easily defended notion: Edmund Wilson as Americanist. (“He was primarily interested in the American scene, and his writing became more saturated with this interest as his life progressed.”) Edmund Wilson’s America, however, is rather more than an academic exercise in belaboring the obvious. Though Mr. Douglas is obviously an admirer of “the great man of letters of our time,” he is not too admiring to let Wilson’s utter ignorance of basic economic theory go unremarked; he is also particularly good on Apologies to the Iroquois and O Canada, two of Wilson’s most interesting and least-read books. There are intermittent lapses from syntactic grace —Mr. Douglas refers at one point to “a youthful jihad against Puritanism” and observes elsewhere that some readers have been “turned off” by Wilson’s later work—but the prose is generally straightforward and unclotted. What we really need, of course, is a double-decker biography from Leon Edel; until we get it, though, books like Edmund Wilson’s America will take up the slack.
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