Volume 5, Number 8 · November 25, 1965
Lessons of the Master
By Frederick C. Crews
The Bit Between My Teeth A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965
by Edmund Wilson
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 694 pp., $7.50
The remarkably prolific Edmund Wilson has now written, or rather assembled, his thirty-first book. As its subtitle implies, The Bit Between My Teeth belongs with Wilson's other 'chronicles,' The Shores of Light and Classics and Commercials—collections of book reviews and occasional essays which, taken together, display the range of his interests from the 1920s to the present. That range remains dazzling; no critic in this century has been so versatile. Nor, despite a marked slackening in intensity and morale from each of Wilson's chronicles to the next, has he lost his gift of communicating a disciplined enthusiasm for unfashionable books and ideas. In an age of cautious specialization he is a genuine man of letters; indeed, without Edmund Wilson we could hardly recall what that term is supposed to convey.
Review, 2306 words
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