When Edmund Wilson died in 1972 he was widely acclaimed as one
of America's great literary critics. But it was often forgotten by
many of his admirers that he was also a brilliant and penetrating
critic of American life. In a literary career spanning half a
century, Wilson commented on nearly every aspect of the American
experience, and he produced a body of work on the subject that
rivals those of Tocqueville and Henry Adams.
In this book George H. Douglas has distilled the essence from
Wilson's many writings on America. An active reporter and
journalist as much as a scholar, Wilson ranged from Harding to
Nixon, from bathtub gin to marijuana. Douglas here surveys Wilson's
mordant observations on the roaring twenties, the Great Depression,
income tax, suburbia, sex, populist politics, the Vietnam War, the
Great Society, the failure of American scholarship, pollution of
the landscape, and the breakdown of traditional American
values.
The Wilson who emerges from this survey is a historical writer
with deep and unshakable roots in Jeffersonian democracy. Among his
most far-seeing and poignant books are studies of the literature of
the American Civil War and of the treatment of the American Indian.
Pained by the crumbling moral order, Wilson was never completely at
home in the twentieth century. In politics he was neither a liberal
nor a conservative as those terms are understood today. He endured
those ideologies and their adherents, but his genius was that he
could bring them into hard focus from the perspective of the
traditional American individualist who was too pained to accept the
standardized commercial world that had grown up around him.
Edmund Wilson's America offers a distinctive overview of the
nation's life and culture as seen and judged by its leading man of
letters.
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