Critic in Love: A Romantic Biography of Edmund Wilson Book

Edmund Wilson, 20th century America's most direct and readable critic of literature and society, was a man of many loves. In his half century as a major force in American letters he had an outsize romantic career that reflected the complex depths of his personality. Each woman whom he came to love was an alluring interpretative problem, an erotic and analytic challenge, a presence that fired his imagination. They came from the Greenwich Village of the 1920s, from his own upper middle class world of privilege, from New York's working class, from the high reaches of literary New York as well as from the workaday world of Talcottville in upper New York State.

Who were they? Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; actress Mary Blair; friends and drinking buddies Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Dawn Powell, and Elinor Wylie; poet Leonie Adams; writer and intellectual Mary McCarthy; Mamaine Paget, later the wife of Arthur Koestler; and screenwriter and journalist Penelope Gilliatt were the best known. They appear here as personalities in their own right as well as in the roles they play in Wilson's biography. His Rabelaisian appetites, ardors and vulnerabilities, and conceptions of love and sex are a story in themselves.

Publishers Weekly

The coauthors' deep familiarity with their subject (they've written biographies of Wilson and edited his letters) serves them well in this spirited, chatty look at his relationships with the opposite sex. Wilson himself reported on his experiences in thorough and unflinching detail in his journals, and this book is similarly not for the prudish-at times it even takes sly delight in the portly critic's unlikely success as a sexual athlete, claiming that he satisfied all his lovers, even into his late 70s. But the biographers also call attention to intellectual relationships based on "affinity... rather than sex" with such fellow writers as Dorothy Parker and Elinor Wylie. All the couplings, sexual and otherwise, are traced through Wilson's writings and, when available, those of the women. An account of his turbulent marriage to Mary McCarthy, for example, includes detailed criticism of the thinly disguised vindictive portraits of Wilson throughout her fiction. Castronovo and Groth's effort is just one-third the size of Lewis Dabney's new, comprehensive biography, but brevity and topic give it a much livelier feel, further enhanced by the authors' casual critical asides to the reader. (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.