Edmund Wilson

This pioneering life of Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) completes the trilogy on modern American writers that Jeffrey Meyers began with his biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Wilson, whom Gore Vidal called "America's best mind," had extraordinarily wide interests that ranged far beyond literature. He wrote about art, theater, music, film, and popular culture as well as political events, foreign travel, the revolutionary tradition in Europe, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Zuni and Iroquois Indians, the American Civil War, the culture and politics of Canada. He was a master of the biographical essay and the autobiographical memoir and was the greatest diarist of his time. . Wilson's life was as interesting as his books and, in its own way, as romantic and chaotic as Fitzgerald's. He lived in bohemian poverty in the 1920s and '30s, suffered a nervous breakdown and the tragic death of his second wife, had three other wives (including Mary McCarthy), attracted an astonishing number of beautiful mistresses (including Edna St. Vincent Millay), and was a compulsive chronicler of his own sexual adventures.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.