When Edmund Wilson died in 1972 he was widely acclaimed as one of America's great literary critics. But it was often forgotten by many of his admirers that he was also a brilliant and penetrating critic of American life. In a literary career spanning half a century, Wilson commented on nearly every aspect of the American experience, and he produced a body of work on the subject that rivals those of Tocqueville and Henry Adams. In this book, George H. Douglas has distilled the essence from Wilson's many writings on America. An active reporter and journalist as much as a scholar, Wilson ranged from Harding to Nixon, from bathtub gin to marijuana. Douglas here surveys Wilson's mordant observations on the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, income tax, suburbia, sex, populist politics, the Vietnam War, the Great Society, the failure of American scholarship, pollution of the landscape, and the breakdown of traditional American values. The Wilson who emerges from this survey is a historical writer with deep and unshakable roots in Jeffersonian democracy. Among his most far-seeing and poignant books are studies of the literature of the American Civil War and of the treatment of the American Indian. Pained by the crumbling moral order, Wilson was never completely at home in the twentieth century. In politics he was neither a liberal nor a conservative as those terms are understood today. He endured those ideologies and their adherents, but his genius was that he could bring them into hard focus from the perspective of the traditional American individualist who was too pained to accept the standardized commercial world that had grown up around him. Edmund Wilson's America offers a distinctive overview of the nation's life and culture as seen and judged by its leading man of letters.

When Edmund Wilson died in 1972 he was widely acclaimed as one of America's great literary critics. But it was often forgotten by many of his admirers that he was also a brilliant and penetrating critic of American life. In a literary career spanning half a century, Wilson commented on nearly every aspect of the American experience, and he produced a body of work on the subject that rivals those of Tocqueville and Henry Adams. In this book, George H. Douglas has distilled the essence from Wilson's many writings on America. An active reporter and journalist as much as a scholar, Wilson ranged from Harding to Nixon, from bathtub gin to marijuana. Douglas here surveys Wilson's mordant observations on the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, income tax, suburbia, sex, populist politics, the Vietnam War, the Great Society, the failure of American scholarship, pollution of the landscape, and the breakdown of traditional American values. The Wilson who emerges from this survey is a historical writer with deep and unshakable roots in Jeffersonian democracy. Among his most far-seeing and poignant books are studies of the literature of the American Civil War and of the treatment of the American Indian. Pained by the crumbling moral order, Wilson was never completely at home in the twentieth century. In politics he was neither a liberal nor a conservative as those terms are understood today. He endured those ideologies and their adherents, but his genius was that he could bring them into hard focus from the perspective of the traditional American individualist who was too pained to accept the standardized commercial world that had grown up around him. Edmund Wilson's America offers a distinctive overview of the nation's life and culture as seen and judged by its leading man of letters.

For the eminent American literary critic Edmund Wilson, Upstate New York was home. Richard Hauer Costa's biography of Wilson's final years, from 1962 to 1972, in Talcottville, NY, combines the literary, the political, and the domestic in an engaging portrait of Wilson as "squierarchical, Dickensian, benevolent." Costa shows us a very personal, accessible man as he tells us about Wilson's opinions, literary and otherwise, his likes and dislikes, his almost spiritual link to Talcottville, his failing health in his final years, his habits (moviegoing) and idiosyncracies (sneakers). What emerges is a profile of Wilson not at all like the stern figure of academic biography. Also included are interviews Costa conducted after Wilson's death with noted Upstate novelist Walter D. Edmonds, Canadian writer Morley Callaghan, and Wilson's Upstate friend, Mary Pcolar.

In a comprehensive examination of how Christian scholars in the United States received, interpreted, and understood Hebrew texts and the Jewish experience, Shalom Goldman explores Hebraism's relationship to American society. By linking history, theology, and literature from the colonial period through the twentieth century, Goldman illuminates the religious and cultural roots of American interest in the Middle East. God's Sacred Tongue is structured around a sequence of biographical and intellectual portraits of individuals including Jonathan Edwards, Isaac Nordheimer, Professor George Bush (an ancestor of President George W. Bush), and twentieth-century literary critic Edmund Wilson. Since the colonial period, America has been perceived as a western Promised Land with emotional, spiritual, and physical links to the Promised Land of biblical history. Goldman gives evidence from scholarship, diplomacy, journalism, the history of higher education, and the arts to show that this perception is linked to the role Hebrew and the Bible have played in American cultural history. The book's final section takes up the story of American Christian Zionism, among whose Protestant adherents political Zionism found much of its strongest support. Religious and cultural figures such as William Rainey Harper and Reinhold Niebuhr are among those who exemplify the centuries-old ties between America, the Land of Promise, and Israel, the Promised Land.

From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In this biography, Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader.

Looks at the Trotskyism movement in the U.S., explains why many radicals fell out with Stalin, and discusses the impact on New York intellectuals of the postwar period

From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In this biography, Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader.