Fun Facts Friday: Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson (8 May, 1895 – 12 June, 1972) was a writer and critic born in Red Bank, NJ.

Books by Edmund Wilson*

1. Edmund Wilson was born in Red Bank, NJ to a prominent local family. Edmund Wilson Sr., his father, was the New Jersey Attorney General.
2. While attending a college predatory boarding school, The Hill School in Pottstown, PA, Mr. Wilson served as the editor-in-chief of the school’s literary magazine.
3. Mr. Wilson attended Princeton University, where he met his lifelong literary friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
4. His first writing job was as a journalist for the New York Sun. Later in his career Mr. Lewis served as the managing editor of Vanity Fair, associate editor of The New Republic, and as a book reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
5. Mr. Wilson wrote plays, poems, novels, and literary criticism
6. Mr. Wilson influenced many authors including Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
7. His 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.
8. Not everyone gets things right, and Mr. Wilson didn’t as well calling the writing of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft “hackwork”, and referring to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as “juvenile trash”.
9. For about 4 decades, from the 1920s to the 1960s, Mr. Wilson was the premier literary critic in America.
10. Mr. Wilson wrote that American English offered more advantages to the writer, because it incorporates the foreign elements brought to America by immigrants.

Books by Edmund Wilson*

Zohar — Man of la Book
*Ama­zon links point to an affiliate account