ABSTRACT
Edmund Wilson (b. 1895) graduated from Princeton, where he was a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in 1916, and began a career in journalism as reporter for the New York Evening Sun. He was managing editor of Vanity Fair 1920-1, Associate Editor of the New Republic 1926-31, and regular book reviewer for the New Yorker 1944-8. Wilson is a rare example of a modern critic who, working successfully in the ephemeral world of literary journalism, has at the same time won the respect and admiration of academic critics, many of whom regard hiin as the greatest American critic of his generation. Some of Edmund Wilson's books have been deliberately researched and written in time saved from his journalistic work-for example, his study of the Symbolist Movement, Axel's Castle (1931), still widely regarded as the best introduction to its subject. But several of Wilson's most interesting and valuable books are collections of his occasional essays and reviews. In a piece entitled 'Thoughts on Being Bibliographed' in the Princeton University Library Chronicle (1943), Wilson commented revealingly on his professional life as a literary journalist:
To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity ••.• My [strategy] lias usually been, first to get books for review •.• on subjects in which I happened to be interested; then, later, to use the scattered articles for writing general studies of these subjects; then. finally, to bring out a book in which groups of these essays were revised and combined.
