Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson (May 8, 1895 – June 12 1972) was an American writer and literary critic. Most experts considered Wilson the preeminent American literary critic of his day, and perhaps of the 20th century. Edmund Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. From 1912 to 1916 he was educated at Princeton University, after attending high school at The Hill School. He began his writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun, and served in the army during the First World War. He was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920 and 1921, and later served as Associate Editor of The New Republic and as a book reviewer for The New Yorker. His works influenced novelists Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Floyd Dell, and Theodore Dreiser. He wrote plays, poems, and novels, but his greatest strength was literary criticism. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931) was... full article at wikipedia