"When I read his work, I forgive him all his sins". Edmund Wilson
disliked being called a critic. He thought of himself as a journalist, and
nearly all his work was done for commercial magazines, principally Vanity Fair, in the nineteen-twenties; The New Republic, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties; The
New Yorker, beginning in the nineteen-forties; and The New York Review of Books, in the nineteen-sixties. He was
exceptionally well read: he had had a first-class education in English, French, and Italian literature,
and he kept adding languages all his life. He learned to read German, Russian, and Hebrew; when he died, in 1972, he was working on Hungarian.
Edmund Wilson and American culture.
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on Aug 25, 2005 -
12 comments
The Suicide’s Soliloquy August 25, 1838, the Sangamo Journal, a Whig newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, carried an unsigned poem, thirty-six lines long. It stands out for two reasons: first, its subject is suicide; second, its author was most likely a twenty-nine-year-old politician and lawyer named
Abraham Lincoln.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin relates how
historians regard a broken off engagement to Mary Todd as the trigger to
his famous depression, but it was his perceived failure as politician, she maintains, that fed Lincoln's
"black dog". (For his depression,
Lincoln probably took "blue mass", a drug prescribed to treat "hypochondriasis," a vague term that included
melancholia). Lincoln's medical history file is
here
posted by matteo
on Jun 7, 2004 -
12 comments
