Published in 1931,
Axel's Castlewas Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Val?ry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer.
Edmund Wilson(1895-1972) was a novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor but it is as a literary critic that he is most highly regarded.
Mary Gordon'smost recent novel isSpending.