Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism-a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist ... He could turn any literary subject...

Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson's critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker. Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man...

The first part of a two-volume collection of essays by a forefront American critic and social chronicler includes pieces written during the 1920s and 1930s and includes "Axel's Castle," "The Shores of Light," and an assortment of previously uncollected reviews.