"In 1940 Edmund Wilson was the undisputed big dog of American letters. Vladimir Nabokov was a near-penniless Russian exile seeking asylum in the States. Wilson became a mentor to Nabokov, introducing him to every editor of note, assigning reviews for The New Republic, engineering a Guggenheim. Their intimate friendship blossomed over a shared interest in all things Russian, ruffled a bit by political disagreements. But then came Lolita, and suddenly...

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...

The distinguished American writer-critic's personal views of and reflections on the places, events, and people of the roaring decade, gathered and edited from his notebooks and journals.