Edmund Wilson

In these pages, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, the preeminent literary critic Edmund Wilson gives us perhaps the largest authentic document of the time, the dazzling observations of one of the principal actors in the American twenties. Here is the raw side of the U.S.A., the mad side of Hollywood, the literary infighting in New York, the gossip and anecdotes of an astonishing cast of characters, the jokes, the profundities,...

From one of the greatest literary critics of the twentieth century, this installment of Edmund Wilson's private notebooks covers the years of the 1940s, providing a rich lens into the writer's life and the world at large. Wilson turned forty-five in 1940, and this volume The Forties: From Notebooks & Diaries of the Period shows the extent to which he was reappraising his life in the decade to follow, saying goodbye to the drifting of the 1920s...

The last of Edmund Wilson's posthumously published journals turned out to be one of his major books, The Sixties: the Last Journal, 1960-1972, a personal history that is also brilliant social comedy and an anatomy of the times. Wilson catches the flavor of an international elite, Stravinsky, Auden, Andre Malraux, and Isaiah Berlin, as well as the New York literati and the Kennedy White House, but he never strays too far from the common life, whether...

Edmund Wilson's The Fifties, edited by Leon Edel, is the highly acclaimed fourth volume in the series that began with The Twenties. It is complimented with photographs and journal excerpts of some of the most interesting characters of the decade, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, W.H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Set in the early 1950s in Montreal, this is the story of enigmatic Peggy Sandersona woman who has become a socially awkward presence due to her open and casual association with black musicians in Lower Town nightclubs. White and black men assume she must be involved sexually with the musicians, white women are perplexed by her, and black women both fear and loathe her. Yet Peggy's almost guileless sense of ease is at complete variance with these assumptions...