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Edmund Wilson

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Author

The Resume

    (May 8, 1895-June 12, 1972)
    Born in Red Bank, New Jersey
    Author, editor and literary critic
    Managing editor of Vanity Fair (1920-21)
    Associate editor of The New Republic (1926-31)
    Critic for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books
    Wrote 'Poets, Farewell!' (1929), 'Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930' (1931), 'To the Finland Station' (1940), 'Memoirs of Hecate County' (1946), 'The Scrolls from the Dead Sea' (1955), 'A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty' (1956), 'Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War' (1962), 'The Cold War and the Income Tax' (1964) and 'Landscapes, Characters and Conversations' (1967)
    Received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963)

Why he might be annoying:

    He hated being described as a literary critic, which is how he is mainly remembered.
    He never learned to drive a car.
    His third marriage, to fellow author Mary McCarthy, was described as 'a mistake that neither side wanted to be the first to admit.'
    He became largely uninterested in contemporary literature after WWII, claiming J.D. Salinger was the only novelist he followed.
    He dismissed H.P. Lovecraft's writing as 'hackwork' and J.R.R. Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' as 'juvenile trash.'
    He failed to file his tax returns for a decade (1946-55) because 'I thought that this obligation could always be attended to later. I had no idea at that time... of the severity of the penalties exacted for not filing tax returns.'
    He then tried to spin his non-payment as a protest against the Cold War and excessive military spending.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He served in an Army field hospital during World War I.
    He was the first American to review T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' and James Joyce's 'Ulysses.'
    F. Scott Fitzgerald called Wilson his 'intellectual conscience.'
    Ernest Hemingway said Wilson's opinion was 'the only one in the States I have any respect for.'
    In addition to English, he knew Greek, French, Italian, German, Hebrew and Russian, and was learning Hungarian when he died.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 6 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 5 Votes: 60.0% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 18 Votes: 55.56% Annoying
    In 2013, Out of 6 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2012, Out of 4 Votes: 75.00% Annoying