Edmund Wilson (1895–1972)
Autore di Stazione Finlandia
Sull'Autore
Wilson roamed the world and read widely in many languages. He was a journalist for leading literary periodicals: Vanity Fair, where he was briefly managing editor; The New Republic, where he was associate editor for five years; and the New Yorker, where he was book reviewer in the 1940s. These mostra altro varied experiences were typical of Wilson's range of interests and ability. Eternally productive and endlessly readable, he conquered American literature in countless essays. If he is idiosyncratic and lacks a rigid mold, that probably contributes to his success as a literary critic, since he was not committed to interpretation in the straitjacket of some popular approach or dogma. His critical position suits his cosmopolitan background---historical and sociological considerations prevail. He went through a brief Marxist period and experimented with Freudian criticism. Axel's Castle (1931), a penetrating analysis of the symbolist writer, has exerted a great influence on contemporary literary criticism. Its dedication, to Christian Gauss of Princeton, reads:"It was principally from you that I acquired.. .my idea of what literary criticism ought to be---a history of man's ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them."His volume of satiric short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), with its frankly erotic passages, was the subject of court cases in a less tolerant decade than the present one. It was Wilson's own favorite among his writings, but he complained that those individuals who like his other work tend to disregard it. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno
Fonte dell'immagine: Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery (image use requires permission from the New York Public Library)
Serie
Opere di Edmund Wilson
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, Revised and Expanded Edition (1979) — Autore — 265 copie
Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s: The Shores of Light / Axel's Castle / Uncollected… (2007) 236 copie
Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s: The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, Classics and… (2007) 217 copie
The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It (1943) 109 copie
Travels In Two Democracies 6 copie
Three Reliques of Ancient Western Poetry: Collected By Edmund Wilson from the Ruins of the Twentieth Century (1964) 3 copie
Poets, Farewell! 3 copie
A Book of Princeton Verse, Volume I — Collaboratore — 2 copie
Max Nomad and Waclaw Machajski 1 copia
Corrections and Comments 1 copia
A Christmas Delirium 1 copia
Szkice 1 copia
The Kipling That Nobody Read 1 copia
An introduction to James Joyce 1 copia
Opere correlate
Gli ultimi fuochi (1941) — Prefazione, alcune edizioni; A cura di, alcune edizioni; Prefazione, alcune edizioni — 2,585 copie
American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume Two: E. E. Cummings to May Swenson (2000) — Collaboratore — 407 copie
The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now (2008) — Collaboratore — 153 copie
Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll's Dream Child as Seen Through the Critics' Looking-glasses, 1865-1971 (1971) — Collaboratore — 117 copie
The Great Gatsby / Tender Is The Night / The Last Tycoon (1953) — A cura di, alcune edizioni — 107 copie
Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (Expanded 10th-Anniversary Edition) (2008) — Collaboratore — 93 copie
War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing (2016) — Collaboratore — 86 copie
The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present (2020) — Collaboratore — 83 copie
Published and Perished: Memoria, Eulogies, and Remembrances of American Writers (2002) — Collaboratore — 37 copie
The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (Southern Literary Studies) (1969) — Prefazione, alcune edizioni; Prefazione — 36 copie
Twentieth-Century American Literature (Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism) (1986) — Collaboratore — 13 copie
Contemporary Short Stories: Representative Selections, Volume 3 — Collaboratore — 6 copie
First Love: Stories by Sixteen of Today's Great Authors of Romantic Fiction (1948) — Collaboratore — 1 copia
32 Współczesne Opowiadania Amerykańskie - Tom I — Collaboratore — 1 copia
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Altri nomi
- Bunny
- Data di nascita
- 1895-05-08
- Data di morte
- 1972-06-12
- Luogo di sepoltura
- Wellfleet, Massachusetts, USA
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Luogo di nascita
- Red Bank, New Jersey, USA
- Luogo di morte
- Talcottville, New York, USA
- Luogo di residenza
- Red Bank, New Jersey, USA
Talcottville, New York, USA
Wellfleet, Massachusetts, USA - Istruzione
- Princeton University
The Hill School, Pottstown, Pennsylvania, USA - Attività lavorative
- managing editor (Vanity Fair)
newspaper reporter
associate editor (The New Republic)
book reviewer
literary critic
historian (mostra tutto 8)
translator
memoirist - Relazioni
- McCarthy, Mary (wife)
Nabokov, Vladimir (friend)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (friend)
Bishop, John Peale (friend)
Zabel, Morton Dauwen (friend) - Organizzazioni
- The Sun (New York)
Vanity Fair
The New Republic
The New Yorker
The New York Review of Books - Premi e riconoscimenti
- Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963)
Emerson-Thoreau Medal (1966) - Breve biografia
- Edmund Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. He attended The Hill School, a private boarding school in Pennsylvania, where he served as the editor-in-chief of the school's literary magazine, then went on to Princeton University, where he was a classmate of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Their friendship became one of the most important literary relationships in the history of American letters. Wilson read omnivorously across the spectrum of modern European and Russian writers, including Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Valéry, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Pushkin, along with almost all the 20th century American writers. He began his writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun, and became the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920. He 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. He wrote plays, poems, and novels, but his greatest influence was as a literary critic, essayist, and historian. These books included Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931) a sweeping survey of Symbolism. To the Finland Station (1940) was a broad study of European socialism up to the Bolsheviks Revolution. Wilson's work was heavily influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, and in turn, his work influenced novelists such as Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser. Wilson was married four times, most famously to Mary McCarthy, who was 17 years his junior, from 1938 to 1946.
Wilson edited the posthumous papers and notebooks of his college friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945), and also edited the novel The Last Tycoon (1941), which Fitzgerald had left uncompleted at his death.
Utenti
Recensioni
The Scrolls from the Dead Sea and The Dead Sea Scrolls 1947-1969
By Edmund Wilson
This is a review of Edmund Wilson’s original book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, published in 1955, and his updated and expanded book, published in 1969. Much like Elaine Pagels’ books about the Gnostic Gospels, Wilson’s books are about the history and interpretation of the Dead Sea scrolls, rather than a translation of the original texts. Wilson’s books, more than Pagels’, are full of high adventure and intrigue, especially because they take place in Palestine, a land notorious for religious and political upheaval, and because of the time in which they take place, from 1947, at the end of the British mandate, to 1969, two years after the Six-Day War between the Arabs and the Israelis. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin boy in a cave along the western shore of the Dead Sea in 1947, two years after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls (gnostic gospels) in Egypt. Unlike the Nag Hammadi texts, which are Christian (written in Coptic), the Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish (written in Hebrew). They are of interest, however, to both Jewish and Christian biblical scholars, although for different reasons.
Wilson explains why the discovery of the scrolls was problematic and upsetting for scholars and why it took some time for them to be accepted as authentic. He reminds us that up until about 400 BCE, the Israeli religion was practiced and handed down through oral tradition. Our earliest written Judeo-Christian scriptures are:
- [ ] The Alexandrian Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that dates from the third century BCE)
- [ ] St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (a Latin translation of the Christian Bible that dates from the late fourth century CE)
- [ ] The Masoretic texts (a translation of the Hebrew Bible that dates from the ninth century CE)
It’s important to remember that almost all knowledge of the Bible, up until the 1947 discovery had come from a small set of texts that span from a period of about 1,300 years - 400 years before Christ with the Septuagint to 900 years after him with the Masoretic texts. As Wilson says, “It took some courage to face new materials where none had been imagined to exist.”
Wilson, one of America’s greatest literary critics, is a brilliant writer. He masterfully weaves a story that combines political intrigue, place-setting in a dry, dusty land where if only the fighting would stop so that archaeologists (several of whom are also clergy) can get on with it, and scholarly bickering and possessiveness of not only the scrolls but of their interpretation as well. His theory, or not so much his but the general consensus of what he believes are the more objective scholars, is that the Essenes, a Jewish communal society who lived from the second century BCE to the first CE, may have been the precedent for Christianity. At the start of his book, Wilson somewhat dryly describes the archaeology of the Essene monastery - the “cave” where the Bedouin boy unknowingly discovered the sect’s library. Much later, after he’s woven his fascinating tale, he connects the archaeological, religious, and historical dots with a beautiful sentence: “The monastery, this structure of stone that endures, between the bitter waters and precipitous cliffs, with its oven and its inkwells, its mill and its cesspool, its constellation of sacred fonts and the unadorned graves of its dead, is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.“
I enjoyed the original of Wilson’s book more than I did the expanded version. The original story was more compelling, and while the expanded version was certainly interesting, it didn’t capture the imagination quite so effectively. Additionally, Wilson weakened the aura of his story with an offputting appendix in the expanded version. The appendix was intended to demonstrate a point he had made consistently throughout both books - that scholars, many of whom have their own personal religious allegiances, often focus on minutia as a way to deflect from the big picture impact of the scrolls on collective Biblical knowledge. Knowledge that for some can be uncomfortable to absorb. Wilson simply could have left it at that because an astute reader understood exactly his point. However, in his appendix, he includes a series of point / counterpoint letters between himself and an anonymous scholarly reviewer of another author’s book about the scrolls. Rather than making himself look good, instead, through the esoteric and bitchy back and forth, both ended up looking like petty cat-fighters. They were both trying to make scholarly points, but to the lay reader, the points didn’t mean much. Instead, I found myself thinking, “Would you both just give it a drink!”
Regardless, I greatly enjoyed the original Scrolls from the Dead Sea. It was exciting to read after having read about the gnostic gospels because it showed the connection between Judaism and Christianity at a time when both were evolving from semi-mythology into written, codified religions.… (altro)
By Edmund Wilson
This is a review of Edmund Wilson’s original book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, published in 1955, and his updated and expanded book, published in 1969. Much like Elaine Pagels’ books about the Gnostic Gospels, Wilson’s books are about the history and interpretation of the Dead Sea scrolls, rather than a translation of the original texts. Wilson’s books, more than Pagels’, are full of high adventure and intrigue, especially because they take place in Palestine, a land notorious for religious and political upheaval, and because of the time in which they take place, from 1947, at the end of the British mandate, to 1969, two years after the Six-Day War between the Arabs and the Israelis. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin boy in a cave along the western shore of the Dead Sea in 1947, two years after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls (gnostic gospels) in Egypt. Unlike the Nag Hammadi texts, which are Christian (written in Coptic), the Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish (written in Hebrew). They are of interest, however, to both Jewish and Christian biblical scholars, although for different reasons.
Wilson explains why the discovery of the scrolls was problematic and upsetting for scholars and why it took some time for them to be accepted as authentic. He reminds us that up until about 400 BCE, the Israeli religion was practiced and handed down through oral tradition. Our earliest written Judeo-Christian scriptures are:
- [ ] The Alexandrian Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that dates from the third century BCE)
- [ ] St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (a Latin translation of the Christian Bible that dates from the late fourth century CE)
- [ ] The Masoretic texts (a translation of the Hebrew Bible that dates from the ninth century CE)
It’s important to remember that almost all knowledge of the Bible, up until the 1947 discovery had come from a small set of texts that span from a period of about 1,300 years - 400 years before Christ with the Septuagint to 900 years after him with the Masoretic texts. As Wilson says, “It took some courage to face new materials where none had been imagined to exist.”
Wilson, one of America’s greatest literary critics, is a brilliant writer. He masterfully weaves a story that combines political intrigue, place-setting in a dry, dusty land where if only the fighting would stop so that archaeologists (several of whom are also clergy) can get on with it, and scholarly bickering and possessiveness of not only the scrolls but of their interpretation as well. His theory, or not so much his but the general consensus of what he believes are the more objective scholars, is that the Essenes, a Jewish communal society who lived from the second century BCE to the first CE, may have been the precedent for Christianity. At the start of his book, Wilson somewhat dryly describes the archaeology of the Essene monastery - the “cave” where the Bedouin boy unknowingly discovered the sect’s library. Much later, after he’s woven his fascinating tale, he connects the archaeological, religious, and historical dots with a beautiful sentence: “The monastery, this structure of stone that endures, between the bitter waters and precipitous cliffs, with its oven and its inkwells, its mill and its cesspool, its constellation of sacred fonts and the unadorned graves of its dead, is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.“
I enjoyed the original of Wilson’s book more than I did the expanded version. The original story was more compelling, and while the expanded version was certainly interesting, it didn’t capture the imagination quite so effectively. Additionally, Wilson weakened the aura of his story with an offputting appendix in the expanded version. The appendix was intended to demonstrate a point he had made consistently throughout both books - that scholars, many of whom have their own personal religious allegiances, often focus on minutia as a way to deflect from the big picture impact of the scrolls on collective Biblical knowledge. Knowledge that for some can be uncomfortable to absorb. Wilson simply could have left it at that because an astute reader understood exactly his point. However, in his appendix, he includes a series of point / counterpoint letters between himself and an anonymous scholarly reviewer of another author’s book about the scrolls. Rather than making himself look good, instead, through the esoteric and bitchy back and forth, both ended up looking like petty cat-fighters. They were both trying to make scholarly points, but to the lay reader, the points didn’t mean much. Instead, I found myself thinking, “Would you both just give it a drink!”
Regardless, I greatly enjoyed the original Scrolls from the Dead Sea. It was exciting to read after having read about the gnostic gospels because it showed the connection between Judaism and Christianity at a time when both were evolving from semi-mythology into written, codified religions.… (altro)
I don't often read books of literary essays anymore, but Wilson was a very fine critic and he brings to light some interesting writers of the Civil War era I hadn't come across before. He also reminds me that Reconstruction was a failed experiment that the Americans should have learned from before they dismantled the Iraqi state. How hard it is to impose democratic institutions where none had been before.
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Statistiche
- Opere
- 91
- Opere correlate
- 37
- Utenti
- 8,014
- Popolarità
- #3,021
- Voto
- 3.8
- Recensioni
- 75
- ISBN
- 234
- Lingue
- 8
- Preferito da
- 17
By Edmund Wilson
This is a review of Edmund Wilson’s original book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, published in 1955, and his updated and expanded book, published in 1969. Much like Elaine Pagels’ books about the Gnostic Gospels, Wilson’s books are about the history and interpretation of the Dead Sea scrolls, rather than a translation of the original texts. Wilson’s books, more than Pagels’, are full of high adventure and intrigue, especially because they take place in Palestine, a land notorious for religious and political upheaval, and because of the time in which they take place, from 1947, at the end of the British mandate, to 1969, two years after the Six-Day War between the Arabs and the Israelis. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin boy in a cave along the western shore of the Dead Sea in 1947, two years after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls (gnostic gospels) in Egypt. Unlike the Nag Hammadi texts, which are Christian (written in Coptic), the Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish (written in Hebrew). They are of interest, however, to both Jewish and Christian biblical scholars, although for different reasons.
Wilson explains why the discovery of the scrolls was problematic and upsetting for scholars and why it took some time for them to be accepted as authentic. He reminds us that up until about 400 BCE, the Israeli religion was practiced and handed down through oral tradition. Our earliest written Judeo-Christian scriptures are:
- [ ] The Alexandrian Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that dates from the third century BCE)
- [ ] St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (a Latin translation of the Christian Bible that dates from the late fourth century CE)
- [ ] The Masoretic texts (a translation of the Hebrew Bible that dates from the ninth century CE)
It’s important to remember that almost all knowledge of the Bible, up until the 1947 discovery had come from a small set of texts that span from a period of about 1,300 years - 400 years before Christ with the Septuagint to 900 years after him with the Masoretic texts. As Wilson says, “It took some courage to face new materials where none had been imagined to exist.”
Wilson, one of America’s greatest literary critics, is a brilliant writer. He masterfully weaves a story that combines political intrigue, place-setting in a dry, dusty land where if only the fighting would stop so that archaeologists (several of whom are also clergy) can get on with it, and scholarly bickering and possessiveness of not only the scrolls but of their interpretation as well. His theory, or not so much his but the general consensus of what he believes are the more objective scholars, is that the Essenes, a Jewish communal society who lived from the second century BCE to the first CE, may have been the precedent for Christianity. At the start of his book, Wilson somewhat dryly describes the archaeology of the Essene monastery - the “cave” where the Bedouin boy unknowingly discovered the sect’s library. Much later, after he’s woven his fascinating tale, he connects the archaeological, religious, and historical dots with a beautiful sentence: “The monastery, this structure of stone that endures, between the bitter waters and precipitous cliffs, with its oven and its inkwells, its mill and its cesspool, its constellation of sacred fonts and the unadorned graves of its dead, is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.“
I enjoyed the original of Wilson’s book more than I did the expanded version. The original story was more compelling, and while the expanded version was certainly interesting, it didn’t capture the imagination quite so effectively. Additionally, Wilson weakened the aura of his story with an offputting appendix in the expanded version. The appendix was intended to demonstrate a point he had made consistently throughout both books - that scholars, many of whom have their own personal religious allegiances, often focus on minutia as a way to deflect from the big picture impact of the scrolls on collective Biblical knowledge. Knowledge that for some can be uncomfortable to absorb. Wilson simply could have left it at that because an astute reader understood exactly his point. However, in his appendix, he includes a series of point / counterpoint letters between himself and an anonymous scholarly reviewer of another author’s book about the scrolls. Rather than making himself look good, instead, through the esoteric and bitchy back and forth, both ended up looking like petty cat-fighters. They were both trying to make scholarly points, but to the lay reader, the points didn’t mean much. Instead, I found myself thinking, “Would you both just give it a drink!”
Regardless, I greatly enjoyed the original Scrolls from the Dead Sea. It was exciting to read after having read about the gnostic gospels because it showed the connection between Judaism and Christianity at a time when both were evolving from semi-mythology into written, codified religions.… (altro)