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American writer and literary critic (1895–1972)

Edmund Wilson Jr. (May 8, 1895 – June 12, 1972) was an American writer, literary critic and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He helped to edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County. He was a friend of many notable figures of the time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. His scheme for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through the efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson's death. He was a two time winner of the National Book Award and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His parents were Edmund Wilson Sr., a lawyer who served as New Jersey Attorney General, and Helen Mather (née Kimball). Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1912. At Hill, Wilson served as the editor in chief of the school's literary magazine, The Record. From 1912 to 1916, he was educated at Princeton University, where his friends included F. Scott Fitzgerald and war poet John Allan Wyeth. Wilson began his professional writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun, and served in the army with Base Hospital 36 from Detroit, Michigan, and later as a translator during the First World War. His family's summer home at Talcottville, New York, known as Edmund Wilson House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

Wilson 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 and The New York Review of Books. His works influenced novelists Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Floyd Dell, and Theodore Dreiser. He served on the Dewey Commission that set out to fairly evaluate the charges that led to the exile of Leon Trotsky. He wrote plays, poems, and novels, but his greatest influence was literary criticism. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931) was a sweeping survey of Symbolism. It covered Arthur Rimbaud, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle Adam (author of Axël), W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. In 1931, monitoring the Coal War in Harlan County, with Mary Heaton Vorse and Malcolm Cowley he was run out of Kentucky by nightriders. In 1932, Wilson pledged his support to the Communist Party USA's candidate for President, William Z. Foster, signing a manifesto in support of CPUSA policies; however, Wilson did not identify personally as a communist. In his book To the Finland Station (1940), Wilson studied the course of European socialism, from the 1824 discovery by Jules Michelet of the ideas of Vico to the 1917 arrival of Vladimir Lenin at the Finland Station of Saint Petersburg to lead the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. In an essay on the work of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, "Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous" (New Yorker, November 1945; later collected in Classics and Commercials), Wilson condemned Lovecraft's tales as "hackwork". Wilson is also well known for his heavy criticism of J. R. R. Tolkien's work The Lord of the Rings, which he referred to as "juvenile trash", saying "Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form." He had earlier dismissed the work of W. Somerset Maugham in vehement terms (without, as he later boasted, having troubled to read the novels generally regarded as Maugham's finest, Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale and The Razor's Edge). In 1964, Wilson was awarded The Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture. Wilson lobbied for the creation of a series of classic U. S. literature similar to France's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. In 1982, ten years after his death, The Library of America series was launched. Wilson's writing was included in the Library of America in two volumes published in 2007.

Wilson's critical works helped foster public appreciation for several novelists: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov. He was instrumental in establishing the modern evaluation of the works of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. Wilson was a friend of the novelist and playwright Susan Glaspell as well as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. He attended Princeton with Fitzgerald, a year and a half his junior. In 1936 in the "Crack Up" essays, Fitzgerald referred to Wilson as his "intellectual conscience [f]or twenty years". After Fitzgerald's early death (at the age of 44) from a heart attack in December 1940, Wilson edited two books by Fitzgerald (The Last Tycoon and The Crack Up) for posthumous publication, donating his editorial services to help Fitzgerald's family. Wilson was also a friend of Nabokov, with whom he corresponded extensively and whose writing he introduced to Western audiences. However, their friendship was marred by Wilson's cool reaction to Nabokov's Lolita and irretrievably damaged by Wilson's public criticism of what he considered Nabokov's eccentric translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Wilson had multiple marriages and affairs. His first wife was Mary Blair, who had been in Eugene O'Neill's theatrical company. Their daughter, Rosalind Baker Wilson, was born on September 19, 1923. His second wife was Margaret Canby. After her death in a freak accident two years after their marriage, Wilson wrote a long eulogy to her and said later that he felt guilt over having neglected her. Wilson, despondent over Canby's death, moved to a rundown townhouse at 314 East 53rd Street in Manhattan for several years. From 1938 to 1946, he was married to Mary McCarthy, who like Wilson was well known as a literary critic. She enormously admired Wilson's breadth and depth of intellect, and they collaborated on numerous works. In an article in The New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote, "The marriage to McCarthy was a mistake that neither side wanted to be first to admit. When they fought, he would retreat into his study and lock the door; she would set piles of paper on fire and try to push them under it." This marriage resulted in the birth of their son, Reuel Wilson (born December 25, 1938). His fourth wife was Elena Mumm Thornton (previously married to James Worth Thornton). Except for a brief falling out following the publication of I Thought of Daisy, in which Wilson portrayed Edna St. Vincent Millay as Rita Cavanaugh, Wilson and Millay remained friends throughout life.

Wilson was also an outspoken critic of US Cold War policies. He refused to pay his federal income tax from 1946 to 1955 and was later investigated by the Internal Revenue Service. After a settlement, Wilson received a $25,000 fine, rather than the original $69,000 sought by the IRS. He received no jail time. In his book The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest (1963), Wilson argued that as a result of competitive militarization against the Soviet Union, the civil liberties of Americans were being paradoxically infringed under the guise of defense from Communism. For those reasons, Wilson also opposed involvement in the Vietnam War. Selected by John F. Kennedy to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Wilson, in absentia, was officially awarded the medal on December 6, 1963, by President Lyndon Johnson. However, Wilson's view of Johnson was decidedly negative. Historian Eric F. Goldman writes in his memoir The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson that when Goldman, on behalf of Johnson, invited Wilson to read from his writings at a White House Festival of the Arts in 1965, "Wilson declined with a brusqueness that I never experienced before or after in the case of an invitation in the name of the President and First Lady." For the academic year 1964–65, he was a Fellow on the faculty in the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University.