1. Edmund Wilson is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century.
25 Facts About Edmund Wilson
1. 2.
Edmund Wilson helped to edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
3.
Edmund Wilson authored a novel, I Thought of Daisy and a collection of short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County.
4.
Edmund Wilson was a friend of many notable figures, including F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and Vladimir Nabokov.
5.
Edmund Wilson was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
6.
Edmund Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1912.
7.
At Hill, Edmund Wilson served as the editor-in-chief of the school's literary magazine, The Record.
8.
Edmund Wilson began his professional writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun, and served in the army with Base Hospital 36 from Detroit, Michigan, and later as a translator during the First World War.
9.
Edmund Wilson was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920 and 1921, and later served as associate editor of The New Republic and as a book reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
10.
Edmund Wilson's works influenced novelists Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Floyd Dell, and Theodore Dreiser.
11.
Edmund Wilson served on the Dewey Commission that set out to fairly evaluate the charges that led to the exile of Leon Trotsky.
12.
Edmund Wilson wrote plays, poems, and novels, but his greatest influence was literary criticism.
13.
In 1932, Wilson pledged his support to the Communist Party USA's candidate for president, William Z Foster, signing a manifesto in support of CPUSA policies; however, Wilson did not identify personally as a communist.
14.
Lovecraft, "Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous", Edmund Wilson condemned Lovecraft's tales as "hackwork".
15.
In 1964, Edmund Wilson was awarded The Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture.
16.
Edmund Wilson lobbied for the creation of a series of classic US literature similar to France's Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.
17.
Edmund Wilson's writing was included in the Library of America in two volumes published in 2007.
18.
Edmund Wilson was instrumental in establishing the modern evaluation of the works of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling.
19.
Edmund Wilson was a friend of the novelist and playwright Susan Glaspell as well as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
20.
Edmund Wilson attended Princeton with Fitzgerald, a year-and-a-half his junior.
21.
Edmund Wilson was a friend of Nabokov, with whom he corresponded extensively and whose writing he introduced to Western audiences.
22.
Except for a brief falling-out following the publication of I Thought of Daisy, in which Edmund Wilson portrayed Edna St Vincent Millay as Rita Cavanaugh, Edmund Wilson and Millay remained friends throughout life.
23.
Edmund Wilson was an outspoken critic of US Cold War policies.
24.
Edmund Wilson refused to pay his federal income tax from 1946 to 1955 and was later investigated by the Internal Revenue Service.
25.
For those reasons, Edmund Wilson opposed involvement in the Vietnam War.