More sanctimonious recommendations

Louis Menand's new profile of Edmund Wilson (apropos of nothing) in The New Yorker is an excellent summation of his talents and impact on American literature (which, in academia at least, has been negligible). With Pauline Kael and Robert Christgau no other critic has influenced me more. In a letter to a friend he once explained:

To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity. You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject.

Words to live by. Get thee to a bookstore and purchase Axel's Castle, To The Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore right now.