To the Finland Station

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) is widely regarded as the preeminent American man of letters of the twentieth century. Over his long career, he wrote for Vanity Fair, helped edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County. »

Louis Menand is the Robert M. and Anne T. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Metaphysical Club—which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Francis Parkman Prize in 2002—and of American Studies, a collection of essays. »

By Edmund Wilson
Foreword by Louis Menand

Edmund Wilson's magnum opus, To the Finland Station, is a stirring account of revolutionary politics, people, and ideas from the French Revolution through the Paris Commune to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. It is a work of history on a grand scale, at once sweeping and detailed, closely reasoned and passionately argued, that succeeds in painting an unforgettable picture—alive with conspirators and philosophers, utopians and nihilists—of the making of the modern world.

Read the foreword (PDF)

Reviews

The idea that binds all these people in all these times and places together, that animates this book and gives it an organic unity, is the great romantic dream of Revolution. . . . In an age of historical amnesia, To the Finland Station can remind us that our history is alive and open and rich with excitement and promise. [It can put] us in touch with the revolutionary dreams and visions of our past. If we read it well, we can use it to teach ourselves how to keep the dreams alive in the present, and maybe even, in the future, how to make the visions real.
— Marshall Berman, The New York Times Book Review

Also see:

Memoirs of Hecate County
By Edmund Wilson
Introduction by Louis Menand

Written in a fine clear style that is not in the least dated, Memoirs of Hecate County deserves to stand among the finest accomplishments of twentieth-century American fiction.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $19.95
Price: $14.96 (25% off)

Apr 30, 2003
544 pages
ISBN: 1590170334
9781590170335
NYRB Classics
History
Politics & Current Affairs

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