The Twenties : from notebooks and diaries of the period

by Edmund Wilson

Other authorsLeon Edel (Editor)
Hardcover, 1975

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.

Description

The distinguished American writer-critic's personal views of and reflections on the places, events, and people of the roaring decade, gathered and edited from his notebooks and journals.

User reviews

LibraryThing member mahallett
dreadful. just a list of fucking. some name mentioning . i read to learn something about nyc in the 20s.
LibraryThing member charlie68
A trip through the 1920s, from New York through Europe and California and then back to New York, with someone rubbing shoulders with literary luminaries of the age. Tedious at times and lyrically beautiful at others.
LibraryThing member ivanfranko
A book that consists mostly of the author's notes and his passing observations makes for difficult reading. At a century's remove it is even more so as most of Wilson's contemporaries have faded into distant memory, if they have not already been forgotten.
That said, despite the names and the
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changed landscape, Wilson at his best provokes interest and wonder in his notes. He takes great pains to describe the everyday natural world; there are detailed "word paintings" of the sky, clouds, sea, snow etc. This graphic representation of natural phenomena is at its best in the Southern California episode and on honeymoon in mid-winter Connecticut.
But mostly, this record covers the social world of cheap booze, speakeasies, the plight of the novice writer and the grinding ugliness of the New York and New Jersey environment in the twenties.
Wilson was early in his fictional stories explicit about sex. The accounts of his passionate sexual relationship with poor Anna, the beautiful, down-trodden Ukrainian waitress provide the basis for the story "The Princess with the Golden Hair", collected in "Memoirs of Hecate County".
Edmund Wilson was a grand critic - singular in his opinions and well-informed. I love his writing, because it reveals someone who derives his criticism by way of a seriously argued thesis.
"Literature is merely the result of rude collisions with reality, whose repercussions, when we have withdrawn into the shelter of ourselves, we try to explain, justify, harmonize, spin into an orderly pattern in the smooth resuming current of a thought..."
"Literature is a long process of neutralizing these shocks, mitigating the crude and barbarous, treachery, murder, unrequited love.... - the constant, never-forestalled outbreaks of our barbarous nature and the accidents of the internal maladjustments of our situation as a part of the universe - we lend them, in art, the logic of our reason and the harmony of our imagination - reason and imagination, like leucocytes accumulating themselves at the place where the infection...has occurred, they rush at once to the breach and, ingesting the alien elements, are discharged in the form of art-"
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