Books, Arts & Manners

Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time,by Janet Groth (Ohio University Press,276 pp., $29.95)

American conservatives have never had much use for—or, for that matter, much interest in—the late American critic Edmund Wilson, who died in 1972 at the age of 77. The most obvious, and no doubt the most important, reason for their indifference is the fact of Wilson’s having been a socialist for part of his life, an agnostic for the whole of it, and a cranky anti-imperialist in his later years. In his self-appointed role as “cross-fertilizer,” operating between the European and American cultures, he was nearly as influential in making the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Freud palatable to the American general reader as he was in making the poetry of the Symbolists and the novels of Proust and Joyce comprehensible to the American reading public.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time,by Janet Groth (Ohio University Press,276 pp., $29.95)

American conservatives have never had much use for—or, for that matter, much interest in—the late American critic Edmund Wilson, who died in 1972 at the age of 77. The most obvious, and no doubt the most important, reason for their indifference is the fact of Wilson’s having been a socialist for part of his life, an agnostic for the whole of it, and a cranky anti-imperialist in his later years. In his self-appointed role as “cross-fertilizer,” operating between the European and American cultures, he was nearly as influential in making the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Freud palatable to the American general reader as he was in making the poetry of the Symbolists and the novels of Proust and Joyce comprehensible to the American reading public.