Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties
by Edmund Wilson
135 Members (3.57)
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Archibald MacLeish and the word -- Van Wyck Brooks's second phase -- The boys in the back room: James M. Cain ; n O'Hara ; William Saroyan ; Hans Otto Storm ; John Steinbeck ; Facing the Pacific -- Max Eastman in 1941 -- T.K. Whipple -- The antrobuses and the earwickers -- Alexander Woollcott of the phalanx -- The poetry of Angelica Balabanoff -- Mr. Joseph E. Davies as a stylist -- Thoughts on being bibliographed -- Through the embassy window: Harold Nicolson -- Kay Boyle and the Saturday show more Evening Post -- The life and times of John Barrymore -- Never apologize, never explain": the art of Evelyn Waugh -- John Mulholland and the art of illusion -- What became of Louis Bromfield -- J. Dover Wilson on Falstaff -- A toast and a tear for Dorothy Parker -- A treatise on tales of horror -- A guide to Finnegans wake -- A novel by Salvador Dali -- A long talk about Jane Austen -- "You can't do this to me!" shrilled Celia -- Aldous Huxley in the world beyond time -- Vladimir Nabokov on Gogol -- Katherine Anne Porter -- A picture to hang in the library: Brooks's Age of Irving -- Why do people read detective stories? -- Bernard Shaw on the training of a statesman -- Reexamining Dr. Johnson -- Leonid Leonov: the sophistication of a formula -- Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? -- "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"--Glenway Wescott's war work -- A cry from the unquiet grave -- Tales of the marvellous and the ridiculous -- Thackeray's letters: a Victorian document -- Splendors and miseries of Evelyn Waugh -- George Saintsbury's centenary -- Ambushing a best-seller -- The apotheosis of Somerset Maugham -- William Saroyan and his darling old Providence -- Oscar Wilde: One must always seek what is most tragic -- George Grosz in the United States -- An old friend of the family: Thackery -- Gilbert without Sullivan -- George Saintsbury: gourmet and glutton -- Books of etiquette and Emily Post -- A dissenting opinion on Kafka -- Jean-Paul Sartre: the novelist and the existentialist -- The musical glasses of Peacock -- Edith Wharton: a memoir by an English friend -- The sanctity of Baudelaire -- Van Wyck Brooks on the Civil War period -- An analysis of Max Beerbohm -- The original of Tolstoy's Natasha -- The most unhappy man on Earth -- William Faulkner's reply to the civil-rights program -- In memory of Octave Mirbeau -- A reivival of Ronald Firbank -- Paul Rosenfedl: three phases. show lessTags
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Author Information
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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 varied experiences were typical of Wilson's range of show more 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) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties
- Original publication date
- 1950
- First words
- Mr. Archibald MacLeish, in his new role of Librarian of Congress, has suddenly taken a turn which must be astonishing even to those who have followed his previous career.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)To have had thirty years of such work is not the least enviable of destinies; and Paul's best writing bears on every page his triumph and his justification.
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Statistics
- Members
- 135
- Popularity
- 239,906
- Rating
- (3.57)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 11
