Critic in love : a romantic biography of Edmund Wilson / by David Castronovo and Janet Groth.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Castronovo, David.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Groth, Janet, 1936-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Wilson, Edmund, 1895-1972--Relations with women.

Wilson, Edmund.

Wilson, Edmund, 1895-1972.

Authors, American--20th century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Relations with women.

Critics--United States--Biography.

Critics.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xvii, 222 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Emeryville, CA : Shoemaker & Hoard, [2005]

Summary:

"Edmund Wilson, critic, writer, and diarist extraordinaire, was a literary celebrity of enormous appetite. In his half century as a major force in American letters he not only knew everyone, he seemed to fall in love with most of them." "Who were they? Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; actress Mary Blair; friends, writers, and drinking buddies Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Dawn Powell, and Elinor Wylie; poet Leonie Adams; writer and intellectual Mary McCarthy; Mamaine Paget, later the wife of Arthur Koestler; and screenwriter and journalist Penelope Gilliatt to name only the best known. They appear here as complete portraits, personalities in their own right as well as in the roles they play in Wilson's romantic and sexual biography."

"Each woman he came to love was an alluring interpretative problem, an erotic and analytic challenge, a presence that fired his imagination. They came from the Greenwich Village of the 1920s, from his own upper middle class world of privilege, from New York's working class, from the high reaches of literary New York, and from the workaday world of Talcottville in upper New York State." "Wilson's Rabelaisian passions, ardors, and vulnerabilities, complicated by his ideas about love and sex, and marriage, are the ingredients of a story quite singular in modern American culture, wonderfully told in this portrait."--Jacket.

Contents:

Artists and bohemians

Proletarians and the bourgeoisie

The intellectual and the cosmopolitans

Endings and beginnings

The sum total : living and writing.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-216) and index.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

1593760507

9781593760502

OCLC:

60360355