One of the great works of modern historical writing, the classic account of the ideas, people, and politics that led to the Bolshevik Revolution

Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea--that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom--gaining the power to change history.

Vico, Michelet, Bakunin, and especially Marx--along with scores of other anarchists, socialists, nihilists, utopians, and more--all come to life in these pages. And in Wilson's telling, their stories and their ideas remain as alive, as provocative, as relevant now as they were in their own time.

Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.

As Alfred Kazin later wrote, Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer.

In the best tradition of literary criticism... combines exact information with shrewd and searching penetration into the personal life of the artist.-The New York Times
Where does artistic genius come from? Originally published in 1941, this classic work of literary critique by Edmund Wilson suggests an answer to that question with seven insightful essays, each one focusing on a different writer, each of which suffered some hardship or handicap that led to the creation of some of the most powerful works of literature.
The first two studies, of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, cover each author's full body of work and reveal how in each case an unhappy childhood later resulted in mature artistic works later in their lives. Subsequent appraisals analyze the writings of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jacques Casanova, Edith Wharton, and Sophocles. Wilson's keen insights and analysis, weaving his thorough knowledge of history, biography, and psychology, led F. Scott Fitzgerald to call him the literary conscience of my generation.
The title The Wound and the Bow refers to the mythical story of Philoctetes, as recounted in the final essay. The legendary Greek archer was bitten by snake and then afflicted with an incurable, malodorous wound that would not heal. After first being banished, the injured hero was later sought out by his fellow warriors for his prowess with a magic bow, and his skill was ultimately key to the Greek victory at Troy.

In the best tradition of literary criticism... combines exact information with shrewd and searching penetration into the personal life of the artist. -The New York Times
Where does artistic genius come from? Originally published in 1941, this classic work of literary critique by Edmund Wilson suggests an answer to that question with seven insightful essays, each one focusing on a different writer, each of which suffered some hardship or handicap that led to the creation of some of the most powerful works of literature.
The first two studies, of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, cover each author's full body of work and reveal how in each case an unhappy childhood later resulted in mature artistic works later in their lives. Subsequent appraisals analyze the writings of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jacques Casanova, Edith Wharton, and Sophocles. Wilson's keen insights and analysis, weaving his thorough knowledge of history, biography, and psychology, led F. Scott Fitzgerald to call him the literary conscience of my generation.
The title The Wound and the Bow refers to the mythical story of Philoctetes, as recounted in the final essay. The legendary Greek archer was bitten by snake and then afflicted with an incurable, malodorous wound that would not heal. After first being banished, the injured hero was later sought out by his fellow warriors for his prowess with a magic bow, and his skill was ultimately key to the Greek victory at Troy.

A Window on Russia is a collection of Edmund Wilson's papers on Russian writers and the Russian language (which he taught himself to read), written between 1943 and 1971. Writers discussed include Pushkin, Gogol, Chekov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, among others.

In A Window on Russia, which Wilson modestly calls 'a handful of disconnected pieces, written at various times when I happened to be interested in the various authors, ' we encounter that rare pleasure of entering a living world where the dead hand of academia never casts its shadow. - Kirkus Reviews

From the author of To the Finland Station comes a deeply personal and incisive memoir, A Piece of My Mind.

Edmund Wilson, often considered to be the greatest American literary critic of the twentieth century, reflects back on life in his sixth decade with this insightful intellectual autobiography that covers topics ranging from Religion, War, the USA, Europe, Russia, Jews, Education, Science, Sex, and much more, all examined with his characteristic wit and intelligence.

In 1964 Mr. Wilson was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal, and in 1963 he was awarded the Freedom Medal by President John F. Kennedy. Edmund Wilson died in 1972.

The 60,000 officials who are appointed to check on us taxpayers are checked on, themselves, it seems, by another group of agents set to watch them. And supplementing these officials -- since private citizens are paid by the Internal Revenue Service to report on other people's delinquencies, and their names of course are never revealed -- there is a whole host of amateur investigators... Does this kind of spying and delation differ much in its incitement to treachery from that which is encouraged in the Soviet Union?