Felicities of Observation: THE FORTIES
Wilson, Edmund
Felicities of Observation THE FORTIES by Edmund Wilson edited by Leon Edel Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 369 pp. $17.95. Literary critic Edmund Wilson, who died in 1972, was forty-five when the...
...Leon Edel has gleaned from Wilson's diaries and notebooks an abundance of interesting material, including notes on his trip to Europe for The New Yorker at the end of World War II, on his stay with New Mexico's Zuni Indians, and on a 1949 sojourn in Haiti...
...but with this are many felicities of observation and feeling...
...Literary critic Edmund Wilson, who died in 1972, was forty-five when the decade covered in this volume began...
...There are fascinating accounts of a meeting with the aged philosopher George Santayana in 1945 in Rome, and a sentimental reunion with his old friend Edna St...
...Indeed, so intense and persistent was Wilson's intellectual curiosity and so superior his powers of observation that even his incomplete sketches and inconsecutive fragments seldom fail to reward one's attention...
...Numerous personal reflections and experiences are recorded, some relating to his third wife, Elena, whom he married in 1946...
...It was a period in which he wrote seven books and more than a hundred essays...
...Vincent Millay...
...In his excellent introduction Edel remarks that Wilson's journals contain "much routine and even turgid material...
Vol. 48 • January 1984 • No. 1
