Volume 22, Number 10 · June 12, 1975
Teacher
By Irvin Ehrenpreis
The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period
by Edmund Wilson, edited with an introduction by Leon Edel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 557 pp., $10.00
From the bleak isolation of a provincial elite, young Edmund Wilson drove himself to escape by way of cosmopolitan society, sexual freedom, and high culture. A dreary chronicle of alcoholic camaraderie now reveals that his personality had set too deeply and too soon for indirect methods to transform it. In middle age he would come to terms with his fate, realizing that the humanistic tradition gave meaning to his life even if it could not expel his demons.
Review, 3510 words
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