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“... up his long and loving friendship with the self-thwarting Esther Murphy in The Fifties (1986), Edmund Wilson recalled how vividly, if also profligately, Murphy – whose particular tragedy was to have an alcohol-saturated writer’s block of mammoth proportions and lifelong duration – embodied ‘the special characteristics of our race of the ...”

“... been trying for a half a century to distinguish the writer from the talking ghost, and some – Edmund Wilson, for instance – found it easier to do the trick than Hemingway himself. When he was young, he worked very hard at never saying anything the way anybody else would say it, and his success was remarkable. Later he often managed to do it ...”

“... a reader might expect to meet in the sort of ghost story where sceptical explanations are absent? Edmund Wilson advanced a version of the projective view, while F.R. Leavis – in the course of a ‘disagreement’ with Marius Bewley on the subject which is contained in Bewley’s The Complex Fate – came out on the other side. Leavis thinks of the tale ...”

“... whose Ulysses was also published in 1922 and immediately recommended to Fitzgerald by his friend Edmund Wilson. Calling his novel ‘Trimalchio’ or ‘Trimalchio in West Egg’ would have signalled to his readers Fitzgerald’s ambitions for his book, his hope that it would take its place alongside the poems of Eliot and the novels of Joyce and Conrad ...”

“... Christie was well put by one of the first grown-up critics to write about detective fiction, Edmund Wilson, in his 1945 essay-review, ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and ...”

“... the young and unpublished Patricia Highsmith to Yaddo in 1948. In 1949 he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in 1949, he described the arrival of Auden on Ischia as having ‘thrown something of a ...”

“... The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist crap for the well-heeled middle-class ...”

“... and Freud that some essential openness closes, the openness you see in the early letters to Edmund Wilson, in the avalanche of epithets he piles on Véra during her stay in a sanatorium before they were married. From the comfortable vantage of a Swiss eyrie, the myths and just-so stories are launched and refined. ‘What have you learned from ...”

“... A plop on the doormat and Volume 177 in the Library of America is in the house: Edmund Wilson’s writings from the 1930s and 1940s, including Classics and Commercials, The Triple Thinkers and The Wound and the Bow. There is something appropriate and even – without wanting to be corny about it – moving about seeing Wilson take his place in the Library of America ...”

“... prepared by Candace McMahon, Bishop wrote, in a foreword; ‘Upon being “bibliographed”, as Edmund Wilson put it, I find I am suffering from “mixty motions”, as a student’s paper put that.’ No one can doubt how many ‘mixty motions’ Millier’s biography, well-documented and admiring though it is, would have aroused in its fastidious and ...”

“... Panter-Downes, London correspondent for the New Yorker, put it) would be impossible to say. When Edmund Wilson visited England in 1956 he was struck by how well-regulated life seemed: ‘In spite of the developments since the last war,’ he wrote, ‘the social system is still largely taken for granted, and it is soothing for an American to arrive in a ...”

“... straightforward narrative of progress or development had been there from the start. Back in 1937 Edmund Wilson had complained that ‘his technique has seemed to mature, but he himself has not grown up.’ Auden would have resisted the logic implied by that ‘but’; he was fond of Nietzsche’s definition of maturity in Beyond Good and Evil – ‘to ...”

“... drawn similarities. Both had married young to older intellectual powerhouse grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as ...”

“... any more than we believe Pip’s great expectations have anything to do with Miss Havisham. Leslie Wilson’s powerful and brilliant book strikes me, first and foremost, as a burlesque. All burlesque is anti-heroic, and The Mountain of Immoderate Desires gives a sardonic version of the 19th-century novel’s trusted heroic themes: a riddle of mysterious ...”

“... which he had been stuck on since 1948, but now he began roaring along, finishing it on 15 March. Edmund Wilson called it ‘the most distinguished long poem by an American since The Waste Land’. Lowell was hardly less enthusiastic. When Bishop read 77 Dream Songs in 1964, the year Lowell’s For the Union Dead and Roethke’s The Far Field came ...”