Edmund Wilson’s critique helped to interest the public in the works of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as establishing a new evaluation of the works of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling
The book is filled with wonderful, self-deprecating humor (as is expected from any person of Jewish origin), wit and charm. The author writes about his errors in judgement, the regrets he has for the few times (that he wrote about) acting like a “star”, he writes about the business he loves with a wink, but sadness of someone who has been through the wringer.
Even though this book is short, the world building is fantastic. The vision of a future that is run by corporations, with little if any input from governments, is eerie and scary.
As a faculty member at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio he founded the Kenyon Review and was its editor until he retired.