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“... the wanderer in the wilderness, embarked on an improbable search for redemption. Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson claimed that her theme was not love but the Midwestern naif who makes the city his home, ‘without ever … losing his fascinated sense of an alien and anarchic society’. This is true; and there is at times something naive in the naif’s ...”

“... both Freudian and contemporary, by the space it opened up for his own long struggle with reality. Edmund Wilson catches the mood in a passage from The Shores of Light: One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom . . . a new sense of power to find ourselves ...”

“... Agee, Hannah Arendt, Fred Dupee, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson – these are some of the names Mrs Trilling mentions – gave the myth one of the best runs it has had anywhere. The language of the myth looks a little odd now – people have repeatedly attacked both Trillings’ use of the Morningside ...”

“... his title we hear nothing of such critics as Virginia Woolf and Cyril Connolly in Britain or Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley in the US. ‘There is much to be said … about the history of the idea of “criticism” before its entry into the university,’ he concedes in a footnote. ‘Naturally I cannot say it here.’ Here as elsewhere in the ...”

“... in the music, though its greatest champion once signed a letter of protest in New Masses with Edmund Wilson, Meyer Schapiro and the Trillings, whom it if difficult to envisage tapping their feet to Count Basie.) The contribution of the Left was not only to discover talent, though nobody else took a serious interest in obscure – and, more ...”

“... from college; he held no formal post in the academy. He was one of a generation of critics – Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley were his contemporaries – who subsisted outside formal institutions of learning and cultural patronage by piecing together journalism, editorial work and freelance writing. Burke is not generally remembered as a New York ...”

“... balance. But they operate in a void. There is nothing else in the books. This was in the mind of Edmund Wilson when he wrote the formidable essay called ‘Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ We can say only that, within the limitations of her craft, Agatha Christie can, at need, write with a verbal adroitness far exceeding anything that has gone ...”

“... wasn’t, or wasn’t only, a pulp craftsman embittered by the faint praise he’d been lobbed by Edmund Wilson before the likes of Eliot and Auden announced themselves as fans. Slick magazine writers were no good either – ‘their scenes are almost tiresomely neat … but they are little men who have forgotten how to pray’ – and when discussing ...”

“... We know little about what Nelly was like (few of her letters survive, and none to Dickens), but Edmund Wilson thought that she might have been the model for Estella, frigid and indifferent, torturing Pip ‘against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be’ – until she ...”

“... him in Proust, but Gide’s observation reminds us that it is pointless to get so worked up – as Edmund Wilson did – about Proust’s dogmas on love, jealousy or sex. These are indeed not intended to prove anything. We come to accept them, surely, as bees in the bonnet of an old friend, for it is one of the last secrets of Proust’s art (and, in ...”

“... once told his son that he couldn’t imagine learning a new language in order to write a book, as Edmund Wilson had done. The achievement of this biography is to have restored ‘Dwight’, as Wreszin calls him, to his proper place as the guardian and transmitter of a noble lineage of dissent, as the author of some essays that will be read for longer ...”

“... fiction was less amenable to ‘modern theories’ – Ray meant psychologising approaches, of the Edmund Wilson kind. Subsequent biographers have tended to fine-tune, amplify or judiciously correct Ray’s version. No one has, or ever will, supersede him. Margaret Forster in 1978 attempted an imaginary autobiography. Ann Monsarrat’s brisk Thackeray: An ...”

“... royal family, a dynasty of deranged drug-dealers dominated by fantasies of homosexual rape. As Edmund Wilson, who hated all English people except his last wife, towards whom he was pointedly uxorious, once observed, ‘the English Revolution took place in America, and since then there have been two parallel social developments that more and more put ...”

“... for writing in the style of the Ladies’ Home Journal, dismissed by modernist-minded critics like Edmund Wilson, and accused in 1933 by Granville Hicks, a ubiquitous critic then in his Marxist phase, of falling ‘into a supine romanticism because of a refusal to examine life as it is’. She received buckets of mail from priests who saw themselves in ...”

“... notes on other lyricists are smart, but disconcerting. They’re like Nabokov tearing strips off Edmund Wilson over Eugene Onegin, or Norman Mailer beating up on his rivals for Heavyweight Champion of the Novel. And they tread all over the melancholy Sondheim shares with Hart. Sondheim once wrote a play of his own, Getting Away with Murder (that old ...”