Why One Bemoans The Lack Of A Proper Library In These Parts

In his review of Lewis Dabney's life of Edmund Wilson, Pankaj Mishra wrote: "With his vivid sense of the past, his active participation in the present, and his quest for a new order, Wilson not only managed, in the first half of his life, to create one of the most wide-ranging and clear-eyed records of this great American transformation—what makes many of his books likely to endure, and to be valued as both personal and social history." Now, Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1920s to the 1940s have been collected in two handsome volumes, leading Colin Wilson to rave, too: "He was a modern-day Theseus in the world of letters, the man who would lead you out of the labyrinth of what, exactly, to read next: not merely for your edification, but for the general good of your soul."