Wilson, Edmund (1895–1972)

US critic and writer. Perhaps the foremost American social and literary critic of the 20th century, he was an editor of Vanity Fair 1920–21, the New Republic 1926–31, and The New Yorker 1944–48. Among his most influential works are Axel's Castle (1931), a survey of symbolism, and The Wound and the Bow (1941), a study of the relationship of neurosis to creativity.

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, Wilson graduated from Princeton in 1916. Other works include satirical sketches in Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), and two works of social history, To the Finland Station (1940), on revolutionary ideology, and The American Earthquake (1958), about the Great Depression. He edited his friend F Scott Fitzgerald's posthumous The Crack-Up (1956). His Patriotic Gore (1962) surveys Civil War literature.