Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0011712, Wed, 17 Aug 2005 09:35:12 -0700

Subject
Edmund Wilson & writers from Fitzgerald to Nabokov ...
Date
Body
----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 09:51:59 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: writers from Fitzgerald to Nabokov ...
Critic of the Century
Reputations

BY ADAM KIRSCH
August 17, 2005

One of the pleasures of reading Edmund Wilson is his sheer
abundance. While he will always be associated with the golden age of
20th century American literature - as a friend, critic, sponsor, and
sometimes antagonist of writers from Fitzgerald to Nabokov - his own
work has an almost 18th-century energy and amplitude. He was a man of
letters in the best sense, willing to try his hand at just about every
genre: drama, verse, fiction, journalism, travel writing, memoir. His
plays and poems are the least part of his achievement, and are seldom
read today, but at least one of his novels survives: "Memoirs of
Hecate County," whose graphic portraits of sex drew on Wilson's own
diaries, and got the book banned when in first appeared in 1946. It
is rare for a writer as genuinely literary as Wilson also to have an
appetite for hands-on reporting, but during the Depression years, he
crossed the country reporting on everything from vaudeville shows to
the Scottsboro Boys' trial, in articles he later collected in "The
American Earthquake." After World War II, he continued to travel
around the world to report on social and intellectual issues - as in
"Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls," which first introduced the
biblical scrolls to a wider public. And he turned to memoir and local
history in autumnal works like "Upstate: Records and Recollections of
Northern New York," a study of the region where he spent much of his
last years.

But Wilson's greatest achievements remain his works of literary
criticism and intellectual history, where he made use of his
unrivaled talent for bringing abstract ideas to concrete life. In an
age when criticism was becoming academic and jargon-ridden - a
development that Wilson combated, especially toward the end of his
career, in polemics with the professoriate - his approach remained
grounded in his experience as a reviewer and journalist. For Wilson,
literature and politics were not academic subjects, but had the
urgent interest of front-page news. Fortunately, most of his best
work is still in print. Here is a short list, decade by decade, of
the books that made Wilson Wilson.

Links:
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[1] http://www.nysun.com/
[2] http://www.nysun.com/article/18717

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