To the Finland Station (New York Review Books Classics)
List Price: $19.95
Price: $7.98
You Save: $11.97 (60%)
List Price:
Price: $7.98
You Save: $11.97 (60%)
|
Wilson Edmund
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War
 List Price: Price: $27.16 You Save: $10.79 (28%) Product Details
DescriptionRegarded by many critics as Edmund Wilson's greatest book, Patriotic Gore brilliantly portrays the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans. Critical/biographical portraits of such notable figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Chesnut, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes prove Wilson to be the consummate witness to the most eloquently recorded era in American history.The period of the American Civil War was not one in which belles lettres flourished but it did produce a remarkable literature which mostly consists of speeches and pamphlets, private letters and diaries, personal memoirs and journalistic reports. Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861-65 in which so many people were so articulate? When Edmund Wilson wrote those words in the fall of 1961, the literature of the Vietnam War had yet to be written, but his point remains well taken. Patriotic Gore is a remarkable survey of Civil War literature, encompassing generals, society ladies, and novelists alike. The readings of these works are suffused throughout by Wilson's literary attentiveness and--occasionally--flashes of humor. Of Abraham Lincoln, for example, he writes, "There has undoubtedly been written about him more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe; and there are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg." Certainly one finds the books and personages that one would expect to find within these pages--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mary Chestnut--but there are plenty of revelations for those who are not already intimately familiar with the period, such as the possible debt the realism of The Red Badge of Courage owes to the novelist John De Forest, or the charming erudition of Confederate general Richard Taylor. The editorial board of the Modern Library determined Patriotic Gore to be one of the 100 best nonfiction works of the 20th century. Whatever one thinks of the list as a whole, nobody who reads this book can begrudge the board that decision. --Ron Hogan
Memoirs of Hecate County (New York Review Books Classics)
 List Price: Price: $8.29 You Save: $11.66 (58%) DescriptionHecate is the Greek goddess of sorcery, and Edmund Wilson's Hecate County is the bewitched center of the American Dream, a sleepy bedroom community where drinks flow endlessly and sexual fantasies fill the air. Memoirs of Hecate County, Wilson's favorite among his many books, is a set of interlinked stories combining the supernatural and the satirical, astute social observation and unusual personal detail. But the heart of the book, "The Princess with the Golden Hair," is a starkly realistic novella about New York City, its dance halls and speakeasies and slums. So sexually frank that for years Wilson's book was suppressed, this story is one of the great lost works of twentieth-century American literature: an astringent, comic, ultimately devastating exploration of lust and love, how they do and do not overlap.
The Sixties
 List Price: Price: $24.95 DescriptionDisintinguished literary critic Edmund Wilson's extraordinary record comes to a fitting culmination in The Sixties, the last of his posthumously published journals, a personal history that is also a brilliant social comedy and an anatomy of our times.
Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York (New York Classics)
 List Price: Price: $19.92 You Save: $0.03 (%) Description
AMERICAN EARTHQUAKE
 List Price: Price: $19.95 You Save: $17.05 (46%) Product Details
DescriptionDuring a twelve-month period in 1930 and 1931, Edmund Wilson wrote a series of lengthy articles which he then collected in a book called American Jitters: A Year of the Slump. The resulting chronicle was hailed by the New York Times as "the best reporting that the period of depression has brought forth in the United States," and forms the heart of the present volume. In prose that is by turns dramatic and naturalistic, inflammatory and evocative, satirical and droll, Wilson painted an unforgettable portrait of a time when "the whole structure of American society seemed actually to be going to pieces." The American Earthquake bookends this chronicle with a collection of Wilson's non-literary articles—including criticism, reportage, and some fiction—from the years of "The Follies," 1923–1928, and the dawn of the New Deal, 1932–1934. During this period, Wilson had grown from a little-known journalist to one of the most important American literary and social critics of the century. The American Earthquake amply conveys the astonishing breadth of Wilson's talent, provides an unparalleled vision of one of the most troubling periods in American history, and, perhaps inadvertently, offers a self-portrait comparable to The Education of Henry Adams.
Wilson Edmund News
|
|