The Sixties
The Last Journal, 1960–1972
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The last of Edmund Wilson's posthumously published journals turned out to be one of his major books, The Sixties: the Last Journal, 1960–1972--a personal history that is also brilliant social comedy and an anatomy of the times.
Wilson catches the flavor of an international elite -- Stravinsky, Auden, Andre Malraux, and Isaiah Berlin -- as well as the New York literati and the Kennedy White House, but he never strays too far from the common life, whether noting the routines of his normal neighbors or the struggle of his own aging.
"Candor and intelligence come through on every page--in this always absorbing journal by perhaps the last great man of American letters." - Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This fifth and final installment of Wilson's journal is at once curiously detached from the 1960s (JFK's assassination gets a single bitter paragraph) and a barometer of that decade's convulsions and of the unraveling of the social fabric. Riddled with passages of great beauty and self-revelation, this hectic daybook is the most wide-ranging of Wilson's journals, covering his movements from his old stone house in upstate New York to teaching at Harvard to New York City, as well as trips to Canada, Hungary, Paris, London, Israel, Jordan. A vast humming collage, the diary is full of encounters with the likes of Stravinsky, Auden, Anais Nin, James Baldwin, George Kennan and Andre Malraux. Wilson, who died in 1972 at age 77, unveils his fulfilling relationship with fourth wife Elena Thornton and documents the emotional collapse of his daughter Rosalind, who had been raised by Wilson's mother. Dabney, who edited The Portable Edmund Wilson , has provided a useful introduction and more than 140 section headings that lend coherence to Wilson's musing on literature, politics and the intellectual scene.
