Almost everyone looked up to him. Writers and critics looked up to him, both those for whom he served as mentor and those ambitious enough to take him as model. So, too, did a company of cultivated readers who knew that regularly Edmund Wilson would come bearing gifts: Read Kipling, even if you detest his politics; read Ulysses Grant's memoirs, even though he was a brute of a general and a dolt of a President; read Agnon, read Dawn Powell, read Pushkin (hopeless as he sounds in English translation), read the Haitian novelist, Philippe Thoby-Marcelin. The whole sweep of world literature seemed in Wilson's grasp, to be sifted, judged, protected. He could sometimes be difficult, even haughty, but in his work he was profoundly the democrat, eager to share every pleasure of literary discovery.

His career took on a heroic shape, the curve of the writer who attains magisterial lucidity in middle age and then, in the years of decline, struggles ferociously to keep his powers. One doesn't customarily think of writers as heroes, nor are heroes always likable. But in Wilson's determination to live out the idea of the man of letters, in his glowing eagerness before the literatures of mankind, and in his stubborn insistence upon speaking his own mind, there is a trace of the heroic. He didn't trim, he didn't court, he remained the same writer in and out of popularity, and he fought hard for what he thought was true. (p. 221)

[There is] something harsh, even truculent, about Wilson's career, as if he is steadily driven to see it through images of embattlement and siege. Despite a strand of rhetorical overstatement, he was, I think, largely right in seeing the literary life as he did. American culture, he wrote in 1923, is overwhelmed with "an enormous mass of diluted intellectual goods," and this judgment, with stacks of supporting evidence, he extended and deepened each decade. It reflected both his basic response to our culture and something so relatively minor as his attitude toward publishers, most of whom, as Daniel Aaron remarks in his introduction to [Letters on Literature and Politics], "he regarded as Henry Adams did Congressmen." I recall once, in talking with Wilson, that his face grew flushed with feeling as he said that every self-respecting writer ought to die owing advances to publishers.

Wilson did not romanticize "the plight of the artist" nor often yield to self-pity. He was a fighter. All through his career, and not only during his radical phase in the 1930's, he took a sharply critical view of American civilization. He saw the serious writer not merely confronting the corruptions of commercial society—that was an old story, almost to be taken for granted. Other temptations, both gross and subtle, had a way of sneaking up. And if you wanted to be a serious writer, you had to fight every inch of the way: fight against the lures of the world, against vulgar popularization, against silly fads, against academic somnolence, against elite snobbism, and perhaps most of all, fight against your own weariness and weakness. (p. 224)