The Forties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period

By Edmund Wilson

From one of the greatest literary critics of the twentieth century, this installment of Edmund Wilson’s private notebooks covers the years of the 1940s, providing a rich lens into the writer’s life and the world at large.

Wilson turned forty-five in 1940, and this volume The Forties: From Notebooks & Diaries of the Period shows the extent to which he was reappraising his life in the decade to follow - saying goodbye to the drifting of the 1920s and the Marxism of the 1930s.

Published posthumously and edited by Leon Edel, The Forties includes observations on his increasingly complicated family matters and covers appreciatively writers like Andre Malraux, W. H. Auden, and Max Beerbohm, as well as entries from his research and travels.

"We can see the beginnings of the masterly work of Wilson's later years, the studies of the American literary and mythic past on which his reputation will surely rest." Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post on The Forties

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780374600051

Edmund Wilson

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. His more than twenty books include Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, To the Finland Station, and Memoirs of Hecate County.

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1940–1945

NOTES FOR THE WOUND AND THE BOW

[EW’s early journals of the 1940s contain miscellaneous jottings which show him groping for the contents of his volume of essays The Wound and the Bow, published in 1941. He seems also to have been thinking of a play and a volume of his shorter fictions and was reading again in Poe and Henry James.]

Studies in the Literature of Trauma?

The Wound and the Bow

1. Sophocles: The Wound and the Bow

2. Dickens

3. Casanova

4. Kipling

5. Justice to Edith Wharton

6. Ernest Hemingway: Bourdon of Literature

7. Peggy Bacon, the Poet¹

8. Kafka

9. Rhapsody on Returning to Provincetown. Joyce?

Octave Mirbeau?²

Woodrow Wilson

Goethe: more light

Nazis: Gilles de Retz, Joan of Arc, and late Roman emperor

[Notes for a play]

Inquisition of Joan: first ordinary third degree, then psychological—her cigarettes.

End of First Act: burst of hysteria?

Scene between man and woman: only thing we have to depend on in the world each other; movements, hystorical forces (hysterical forces), nothing; the relationship between individual human beings. —This must later go to