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30-409: The book made Strachey's name and placed him firmly in the top rank of biographers . Strachey developed the idea for Eminent Victorians in 1912, when he was living on occasional journalism and writing dilettante plays and verse for his Bloomsbury friends. He went to live in the country at East Ilsley and started work on a book then called Victorian Silhouettes , containing miniature biographies of

60-404: A relief expedition it arrived just two days too late. Strachey based Gordon’s story on his diaries and letters to give an account of a strong individual almost at odds with the world. On 21 May 1918, Bertrand Russell wrote to Gladys Rinder from Brixton Prison , in which he was imprisoned for his anti-war campaigning: It is brilliant, delicious, exquisitely civilized. I enjoyed as much as any

90-413: A dozen notable Victorian personalities. In November 1912, he wrote to Virginia Woolf that their Victorian predecessors "seem to me a set of mouth bungled hypocrites". After his research into the life of Cardinal Manning , he realised he would have difficulty managing twelve lives. In the following year he moved to Wiltshire , where he stayed until 1915, by which time he had completed half the book. One of

120-659: A result of competitive militarization against the Soviet Union , the civil liberties of Americans were being paradoxically infringed under the guise of defense from Communism. For those reasons, Wilson also opposed involvement in the Vietnam War . Selected by John F. Kennedy to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom , Wilson, in absentia, was officially awarded the medal on December 6, 1963, by President Lyndon Johnson . However, Wilson's view of Johnson

150-543: Is also well known for his heavy criticism of J. R. R. Tolkien 's The Lord of the Rings , which he referred to as "juvenile trash", saying "Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form." He had earlier dismissed the work of W. Somerset Maugham in vehement terms (without, as he later boasted, having troubled to read the novels generally regarded as Maugham's finest, Of Human Bondage , Cakes and Ale and The Razor's Edge ). In 1964, Wilson

180-475: Is both personally intolerable and admirable in her achievements. Dr Arnold is hailed as an exemplar who established the Public School system. Strachey describes that as an education based on chapel and the classics, with a prefectorial system to maintain order. He points out that it was not Arnold who was responsible for the obsession with sport, but does make it clear that Arnold was at fault in ignoring

210-661: The Coal War in Harlan County , with Mary Heaton Vorse and Malcolm Cowley he was run out of Kentucky by nightriders. In 1932, Wilson pledged his support to the Communist Party USA 's candidate for president, William Z. Foster , signing a manifesto in support of CPUSA policies; however, Wilson did not identify personally as a communist. In his book To the Finland Station (1940), Wilson traced

240-658: The Dewey Commission that set out to fairly evaluate the charges that led to the exile of Leon Trotsky . He wrote plays, poems, and novels, but his greatest influence was literary criticism. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931) was a sweeping survey of Symbolism . It covered Arthur Rimbaud , Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (author of Axël ), W. B. Yeats , Paul Valéry , T. S. Eliot , Marcel Proust , James Joyce , and Gertrude Stein . In 1931, monitoring

270-660: The First World War . His family's summer home at Talcottville, New York , known as Edmund Wilson House , was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Wilson was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920 and 1921, and later served as associate editor of The New Republic and as a book reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books . His works influenced novelists Upton Sinclair , John Dos Passos , Sinclair Lewis , Floyd Dell , and Theodore Dreiser . He served on

300-406: The "profoundly evil" system, "by which it is sought to settle international disputes by force". By 1917, the work was ready for publication and Strachey was put in touch with Geoffrey Whitworth at Chatto & Windus . The critic Frank Arthur Swinnerton was taken with the work and it was published on 9 May 1918, with almost uniformly enthusiastic reviews. Each of the lives is very different from

330-521: The Gordon, which alone was quite new to me. I often laughed out loud in my cell while I was reading the book. The warder came to my cell to remind me that prison was a place of punishment. The American critic Edmund Wilson wrote in the New Republic of 21 September 1932, not long after Strachey's death: "Lytton Strachey's chief mission, of course, was to take down once and for all the pretensions of

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360-632: The Iroquois (1960), and the American Civil War in Patriotic Gore (1962)." Wilson also authored a novel, I Thought of Daisy (1929) and a collection of short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946). He was a friend of many notable figures, including F. Scott Fitzgerald , Ernest Hemingway , John Dos Passos and Vladimir Nabokov . His dream for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through

390-589: The Movement and its main protagonists, particularly Manning's hostile relationship with John Henry Newman . Strachey is critical of Manning's underhand manipulations in attempting to prevent Newman being made a Cardinal. The background features of Florence Nightingale's story are the machinations of the War Office , and the obtuseness of the military and politicians. Influenced by Sigmund Freud , Strachey depicts Florence Nightingale as an intense, driven woman who

420-666: The Victorian age to moral superiority ... neither the Americans nor the English have ever, since Eminent Victorians appeared, been able to feel quite the same about the legends that had dominated their pasts. Something had been punctured for good." With the publication of Eminent Victorians , Lytton Strachey set out to breathe life into the Victorian era for future generations to read. Up until that point, as Strachey remarked in

450-778: The age of 44) from a heart attack in December 1940, Wilson edited two books by Fitzgerald ( The Last Tycoon and The Crack-Up ) for posthumous publication, donating his editorial services to help Fitzgerald's family. Wilson was also a friend of Nabokov, with whom he corresponded extensively and whose writing he introduced to Western audiences. However, their friendship was marred by Wilson's cool reaction to Nabokov's Lolita and irretrievably damaged by Wilson's public criticism of what he considered Nabokov's eccentric translation of Pushkin 's Eugene Onegin . Wilson had multiple marriages and affairs. He wrote many letters to Anaïs Nin , criticizing her for her surrealistic style, because it

480-649: The course of European socialism, from the 1824 discovery by Jules Michelet of the ideas of Vico to the 1917 arrival of Vladimir Lenin at the Finland Station of Saint Petersburg to lead the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution . In an essay on the work of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft , "Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous", Wilson condemned Lovecraft's tales as "hackwork". Wilson

510-465: The editor-in-chief of the school's literary magazine , The Record . From 1912 to 1916, he was educated at Princeton University , where his friends included F. Scott Fitzgerald and war poet John Allan Wyeth . Wilson began his professional writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun , and served in the army with Base Hospital 36 from Detroit, Michigan, and later as a translator during

540-691: The efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson's death. He was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. He died in 1972 at age 77. Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey . His parents were Edmund Wilson Sr. , a lawyer who served as New Jersey Attorney General , and Helen Mather (née Kimball). Wilson attended The Hill School , a college preparatory boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania , graduating in 1912. At Hill, Wilson served as

570-537: The others, although there are common threads, for example, the recurrent appearance of William Ewart Gladstone and Arthur Hugh Clough . Each story is set against a specific background. In Cardinal Manning's story, the background is the creation of the Oxford Movement and the defection of an influential group of Church of England clergy to the Catholic Church . That is covered in depth to explain

600-411: The preface, Victorian biographies had been "as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism." Strachey defied the tradition of "two fat volumes ... of undigested masses of material", and took aim at the four venerated figures. British Labour politician Roy Hattersley wrote: "Lytton Strachey's elegant, energetic character assassinations destroyed for ever

630-533: The pretensions of the Victorian age to moral supremacy.". Biographer Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.237 via cp1104 cp1104, Varnish XID 212011426 Upstream caches: cp1104 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 07:48:38 GMT Edmund Wilson Edmund Wilson Jr. (May 8, 1895 – June 12, 1972)

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660-556: The sciences. Although Arnold was revered at the time, Strachey sees his approach as very damaging in retrospect. Strachey also mocks Arnold's efforts at moral improvement of the general public, for example his unsuccessful weekly newspaper. The story of Gordon is that of a maverick soldier and adventurer, whose original military achievements in China would have been forgotten. He was a mercenary who got into and out of conflicts on behalf of various dubious governments, but much of his experience

690-401: The subjects he considered but rejected was Isabella Beeton . He chose not to write about her because he could not find sufficient relevant material. By then it was wartime , and Strachey's anti-war and anti-conscription activities were taking up his time. He hardened his views and concluded that the Victorian worthies had not just been hypocrites, but that they had bequeathed to his generation

720-583: Was also an outspoken critic of US Cold War policies. He refused to pay his federal income tax from 1946 to 1955 and was later investigated by the Internal Revenue Service . After a settlement, Wilson received a $ 25,000 fine, rather than the original $ 69,000 sought by the IRS. He received no jail time. In his book The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest (1963), Wilson argued that as

750-873: Was an American writer, literary critic and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker . He helped to 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 . His notable works include Axel's Castle (1931), described by Joyce Carol Oates as "a groundbreaking study of modern literature." Oates writes that Wilson "encroached fearlessly on areas reserved for academic 'experts': early Christianity in The Dead Sea Scrolls (1955), native American civilization in Apologies to

780-668: Was awarded The Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture. Wilson lobbied for the creation of a series of classic U.S. literature similar to France's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade . In 1982, ten years after his death, The Library of America series was launched. Wilson's writing was included in the Library of America in two volumes published in 2007. Wilson's critical works helped foster public appreciation for several novelists: Ernest Hemingway , John Dos Passos , William Faulkner , F. Scott Fitzgerald , and Vladimir Nabokov . He

810-530: Was decidedly negative. Historian Eric F. Goldman writes in his memoir The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson that when Goldman, on behalf of Johnson, invited Wilson to read from his writings at a White House Festival of the Arts in 1965, "Wilson declined with a brusqueness that I never experienced before or after in the case of an invitation in the name of the President and First Lady." For the academic year 1964–65, he

840-573: Was in the Sudan . The final disaster was when the Egyptian occupation of Sudan was almost completely overthrown by fundamentalist rebels, and someone was needed to retrieve the situation in Khartoum . The job fell to Gordon, whose instincts were to do anything but withdraw, and he became embroiled in a siege. The British government was put in an almost impossible dilemma, and when eventually they did send

870-455: Was instrumental in establishing the modern evaluation of the works of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling . Wilson was a friend of the novelist and playwright Susan Glaspell as well as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin . He attended Princeton with Fitzgerald, a year-and-a-half his junior. In 1936 in the "Crack-Up" essays , Fitzgerald referred to Wilson as his "intellectual conscience ... [f]or twenty years". After Fitzgerald's early death (at

900-418: Was opposed to the realism that was then deemed correct writing, and he ended by asking for her hand — "I would love to be married to you, and I would teach you to write" — which she took as an insult. Except for a brief falling-out following the publication of I Thought of Daisy , in which Wilson portrayed Edna St. Vincent Millay as Rita Cavanaugh, Wilson and Millay remained friends throughout life. Wilson

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