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Edmund Wilson, this era's greatest man of letters, made no attempt to preserve his own correspondence - only two copies of his letters were found among a vast collection of papers and notebooks. Fortunately, Elena Wilson has recovered a major portion of her late husband's wide-ranging correspondence for this collection. "At the very beginning," she explains, "it was decided that no love letters or letters on private family matters should be included. This did not totally exclude personal letters, since correspondence with close friends cannot help but be personal." Mrs. Wilson's selection provides an engrossing biographical continuity rarely achieved by a volume of letters. We follow Wilson's trip to Russia and the Finland Station in 1935, to Europe as a war correspondent in '45, and to Israel in '55 and '67. We are witness to the genesis and development of his own work and to that insatiable literary curiosity and integrity which led him to master Greek and Latin, French, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, and Hebrew. Wilson's dedication to literature is apparent even in the letters of his preparatory-school days. As a young man in his twenties he was already a critic capable of prophesying the importance of Joyce and Eliot. Yet throughout his correspondence with friends and other writers - F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop, Louise Bogan, Allen Tate, Leon Edel, Van Wyck Brooks, Alfred Kazin, John Berryman, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others - his interest in social, as well as purely literary, matters is revealed. As Daniel Aaron states in his Introduction, "To the writers and readers he refreshed and delighted, to the recipients of his pungent, prickly, affectionate letters, Edmund Wilson was the moral and intellectual conscience of his generations." - Dust jacket.