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14 unusual facts about Edmund Wilson


Culture of Montreal

The nineteenth-century poet Émile Nelligan, whom American critic Edmund Wilson famously called "the only first-rate Canadian poet, French or English," has many schools and libraries named in his honour in Montreal and around Quebec.

Edmund Wilson House

It was named "The Stone House" by Edmund Wilson, whose family used the house as a summer home and he made it famous in his book Upstate.

Edmund Wilson, Sr.

In the spring of 1923, Wilson developed pneumonia in Talcottville, New York at an unheated stone house long owned by the Kimballs, his wife Helen's family.

Among Edward Sr.'s close friends was Sigmund Eisner (great-grandfather of Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner), with whom he worked to improve the Red Bank school system.

Finland Station

This event is also referred to in the title of Edmund Wilson's book To the Finland Station (1940), a well-known study of revolutionary thought.

Henry Hermann Mumm Thornton

Henry Hermann Mumm Thornton (born 1932) was a prominent banker and businessman whose young adulthood was detailed in the journals of his stepfather Edmund Wilson, the noted essayist and scholar.

Signs and Symbols

Nabokov objected strongly, supported by his friend Edmund Wilson, and the story was printed mostly as he wrote it.

Talcottville, New York

The author and critic Edmund Wilson was a summer resident, and wrote "Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern (sic) New York" (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971; reprint, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), a memoir of his time in Talcottville.

Tess Slesinger

In James T. Farrell's novel Sam Holman (not published until 1994), there are thinly-veiled fictional portraits of many prominent New York intellectuals (including Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Trilling, Elinor Rice, and Edmund Wilson), the character of Frances Dunsky is based on Slesinger.

The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

There are many more references to prominent crime writers and their works, including, tongue-in-cheek, an anachronistic allusion to critic Edmund Wilson's 1945 essay, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?".

The Awkward Age

F.R. Leavis praised it highly, calling it "one of James' major achievements." Edmund Wilson, on the other hand, showed little patience with the "gibbering crew" surrounding Nanda with their vaguely corrupt schemes.

The Cream of the Jest

According to Edmund Wilson, The Cream of the Jest achieved "critical success".

To the Finland Station

To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940) is a book by American critic and historian Edmund Wilson.

What Maisie Knew

Edmund Wilson was one of many critics who admired both the book's technical proficiency and its judgment of a negligent and damaged society.


Christian Gauss

Gauss influenced and corresponded frequently with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson.

Harry Kemp

Kemp knew many of the bohemian and progressive literary and cultural figures of his generation, including Elbert Hubbard, Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Bernarr MacFadden, Sinclair Lewis, Max Eastman, Eugene O'Neill, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and many others.

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Some other works that he translated are: Pre-Philosophy by Henry Frankfurt and Others; Sight and Insights by Alexander Elliot; The Author and His Profession by 10 American critics; The Life in Drama by Eric Bentley; The Myth and the Symbol by several critics; Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson; Articles by 14 American critics about poet Dylan Thomas; Albert Camus by Germen Perry; and The Tower of Babel by André Barot.

Malcolm Cowley

As one of the dozens of creative literary and artistic figures who migrated during the 1920s to Paris, France and congregated in Montparnasse, Cowley returned to live in France for three years, where he worked with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell, Harry Crosby, Caresse Crosby and others.

Politics and the English Language

In this he highlights the double-talk and appalling prose of J. D. Bernal in the same magazine, and cites Edmund Wilson's damnation of the prose of Joseph E. Davies in Mission to Moscow.