Many of Wilson's writings have been anthologized. But there is another body of work over fifty fine essays on aspects of contemporary literature and ideas that have been scattered in a variety of magazines, including "The New Yorker," "The New Republic," "Vanity Fair," and "The Nation." The editors, who recognize Wilson (1895-1972) as one of America's greatest men of letters of the twentieth century, also view his writing as a powerful antidote to late twentieth-century trends and fads and have collected his pieces here in the conviction that Wilson's writing is a permanently important model....

Among the major writers of the Hemingway and Fitzgerald generation, Edmund Wilson defied categorization. He wrote essays, stories and novels, cultural criticism, and contemporary chronicles, as well as journals and thousands of letters about the literary life and his own private world. Here for the first time in print is Wilson's personal correspondence to his parents, lovers and wives, children, literary comrades, and friends from the different corners of his life. Various writers and thinkers including Alfred Kazin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Isaiah Berlin take their places alongside upstate New...