Edmund Wilson (author) (1895-1972), American author and critic, regarded by many as the foremost man of letters and molder of literary taste of his time in the United States. Wilson wrote about a variety of subjects and in many forms—including the novel, the short story, drama, verse, history, and biography—but he was preeminently a social and literary critic.

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, Wilson was educated at Princeton University. Later he was an editor with Vanity Fair and the New Republic and a book reviewer for The New Yorker. His lucid, elegant literary criticism was concerned with the social and psychological forces that influenced writers as well as with the literary aspects of their work. Wilson's books were often based on his reviews, which he wove together into continuous narratives. His first major work was Axel's Castle (1931), a critical examination of the symbolist influence on the English poet T. S. Eliot, the Irish writer James Joyce, and others (see Symbolist Movement). The Wound and the Bow (1941) dealt with the relationship between the emotional lives of writers and their work. Concerned with social problems, at the onset of the Great Depression Wilson wrote The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (1932). Attracted by radical political movements, he wrote To the Finland Station (1940), about the theoretical foundation of the Russian Revolution. His Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), a collection of short stories, was banned for a time as obscene. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) is considered one of his finest critical studies. Wilson's other works include the novel I Thought of Daisy (1929); The Dead Sea Scrolls (1955), an archaeological report; and the autobiographical Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York (1971). Wilson's notes were published posthumously as The Twenties (1975), The Thirties (1980), The Forties (1983), The Fifties (1986), and The Sixties (1993).