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.
For half a century, Edmund Wilson played a major role in American letters. He also often acted as the playboy of its cultural and literary elite: Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, actress Mary Blair, writer Mary McCarthy, poet Leonie Adams, and journalist and screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt were among his numerous dalliances. Add Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, and Elinor Wylie as his drinking buddies, and it's easy to see why authors David Castronovo and Janet Groth turned a curious eye to the portly critic and his unlikely romantic successes. Each woman he came to know posed an alluring interpretive problem, an erotic or analytic challenge, a presence that fired his imagination. In the able hands of Castronovo and Groth, Wilson's Rabelaisian passions, ardors, and vulnerabilities -- complicated by his ideas about love, sex, and marriage -- become the ingredients of a story quite singular in modern American culture.
