Edmund Wilson (1895 – 1972)
American writer and literary critic.
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Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him.
He was the perfect autodidact. He wanted to know it all.
Wilson is not like other critics; some critics are boring even when they are original; he fascinates even when he is wrong.
Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.
It may be that there is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.
He was, as painted, aristocratic, beyond any writer I've met, but in a Jeffersonian-American way that brooked no artificial distinctions. There was no cheap way you could impress him... It was a particular strength of his as a critic that he was not even impressed by the Dead as such. He could write of living authors in precisely the same tones, and applying the same standards, as he used for the Classics.
Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods.
In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.
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