Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was America’s most influential literary critic from the early 1920s through the 1950s. During those decades, his reviews and essays in such publications as Vanity Fair, the New Republic and especially the New Yorker introduced readers to many new writers. For example, Wilson encouraged his good friend and former fellow Princeton student F. Scott Fitzgerald and personally rekindled Fitzgerald’s literary reputation with a series of essays after the author’s early death. Wilson was the first in the U.S. to review Ernest Hemingway’s work, the first to consider Yeats the great modern poet and the critic who helped to introduce the work of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton to a general audience. In later years, Wilson praised the work of his friends W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov and promoted the work of Israeli author S.Y. Agnon before that author received the Nobel Prize in literature.

But Wilson was concerned with more than literature. His wide-ranging intellectual curiosity led him to report on the U.S. during the Depression and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He explored the literature of the Civil War and religious ceremonies of Native Americans. He also shared his travel experiences in Stalin’s Russia of the 1930s, Europe after World War II and other places. Lewis M. Dabney’s Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature brings the tempestuous private life of its subject including his four marriages, the third to another prominent literary figure, Mary McCarthy and his incredibly productive writing life into sharp focus. Wilson wrote much about himself, and his journals and correspondence have long been available. Dabney uses these sources, but he has gone far beyond them to talk with Wilson’s friends and to do other research for a more balanced perspective. Perhaps Dabney’s greatest accomplishment is to demonstrate the depth of Wilson’s achievement and why it was and remains important.

Dabney describes Wilson as the last great critic in the English line. What led to his pre-eminence, Dabney says, was that Readers respond to what Auden called the unassertive elegance of his prose, to his vigorous narrative rhythm, his reserve of apt and forceful imagery, and his art of quotation. As a critic he correlates the writing of others with their personalities, and in all his work sympathy is matched to relentless analysis. Dabney relates in fascinating detail how Wilson’s body of work, which also includes fiction, poetry and plays, came into being and points out strengths as well as weaknesses in certain works.

Not long after Wilson’s graduation from college, his father asked Don’t you think you ought to concentrate on something? Wilson replied, Father, what I want to do is to try to get to know something about all the main departments of human thought. He probably did not reach that objective, but he certainly got further along than many of us. Even those who have never heard of or read Wilson may have been touched by him: he was the prime mover behind what we know today as The Library of America, uniform editions of the works of major U.S. authors, even though publication of that series did not begin until after his death. And contemporary writers continue to be influenced by him. Perhaps the most prominent example is Louis Menand, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club was inspired by Wilson’s To the Finland Station. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

For a one-of-a-kind perspective on the life of a literary legend, pick up Eudora Welty’s On William Faulkner, an appealing little collection of Welty’s writings on the master of Southern storytelling. The compilation includes photographs, essays, speeches and letters, providing lucid evaluations of the man as well as his work. Welty, who hailed from Jackson, Mississippi, possessed a unique understanding of Faulkner’s fiction, and it shows here in her critiques of classics like Intruder in the Dust and “The Bear.” Other highlights in the volume include a spot-on caricature of the author drawn by Welty herself, and a postcard she received from Faulkner, sent from Hollywood in 1943, complimenting her own fiction (“You are doing very fine. Is there any way that I can help you?”). Although the two were never close, Welty considered herself a “Yoknapatawphanatic” and entertained a reverence for the Nobel laureate, whom she once described as “our greatest living writer.” A must-have for fans of Southern literature, the book represents a rare confluence of two very different authors, both of whom called Mississippi home. Welty and Faulkner it doesn’t get much better than this.

Alfred Habegger’s magnificent biography of Emily Dickinson, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, is a comprehensive portrait of the poet’s life and art. Exploring the lives of those closest to her, Habegger discusses the sources of many of the influences on her work. A former professor of English at the University of Kansas, he believes that an understanding of Dickinson’s chronology shows not only how her work reflects various stages in her life, but also how her poetry developed over time.

The world beyond Emily Dickinson’s family circle was, in most ways, effectively closed to her. Her father dominated the family and regarded women as intellectually inferior to men. Home was secure, but it was also oppressive and anxious. The brilliant Emily, however, not only adapted to her circumstances but used them to her advantage in writing some of the world’s finest poetry. Another influential figure was her sister-in-law Susan. Married to Emily’s brother Austin, Susan’s entry into the family would change it forever, Habegger writes. Among other things, for a significant period, Sue seems to have been a constantly available audience alert, intelligent, tasteful, nodding approval, often silent. During one of her most productive periods, from 1863-65, Emily sent Sue 73 poems. The complexity of the relationship between the two women is explored in detail by Habegger, who notes that Dickinson was always seeking intimacy and finding it withheld. This pattern shows up not only in her friendships but in her orientation to nature and religion. The biography examines in depth the place of religion and the roles of ministers in Dickinson’s life and thought. An early influence was the Reverend Aaron M. Colton, who was her minister for 13 years. Instead of being a polished public speaker, Colton devised a laconic, not always correct, yet vividly expressive style that seems to have had a major influence on the future poet, Habegger says. Whatever else she may have learned from him, the young poet derived something else of incalculable value from her minister: a sense of the power of language. Habegger discusses the two collections Dickinson assembled during her lifetime. One was, of course, the bundles of poems discovered after her death. The other, her sixty-six page book of pressed flowers, has been all but ignored by her biographers. But it had a particular significance for Dickinson. The experience of being outdoors collecting the specimens was a defining activity for her. They announced the seasons, Habegger writes, and the seasons came to be emblems of psychic existence. In this and other ways, the poet turned from nature and the outdoors to the conservatory of the imagination. Habegger notes that it would have been easy for the poet to find a publisher. Those who received her poems and realized how special they were often shared them with equally fascinated friends. This seems to be how Dickinson wanted to be read . . . It would have been unthinkable for her to give up the protection and privacy she required. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books abounds with astute observations and insights into Dickinson’s personal life. Illuminating the mystery behind this elusive literary figure, Habegger has produced an exhaustive and detailed biography of perhaps the greatest of American poets.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

This much-celebrated biography of one of history’s foremost memoirists is a triumph of accessible scholarship. In his daily diary, Samuel Pepys described life in Restoration England, documenting catastrophic events like the Great Plague (1665) and the Great Fire (1666) in mesmerizing detail and commenting on England’s stormy political scene. Tomalin introduces readers to the man behind the memoir, examining his early career in the government, his years as a navy official and his connections to notables such as Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and King Charles II. Pepys’ personal life, which included one tumultuous marriage and numerous illicit amours, is also scrutinized here. Tomalin tells Pepys’ story with energy and authority, creating a lively profile of this unique man of letters a writer with a shrewd eye, unmatchable wit and incomparable intellect.

Medgar Evers, Sovereignty Commission, Byron De La Beckwith, Ole Miss all conjure up images of Mississippi and its pivotal role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Two new books one by a black man and another by a white woman offer fascinating glimpses into the social structure of Mississippi at a time when it was at the center of historic change.

W. Ralph Eubanks, publishing director at the Library of Congress, discovered in 1998 that his parents’ names had been on a watch list developed by the infamous Sovereignty Commission, established by the Mississippi legislature in the 1950s as a means to preserve segregation. Intrigued, Eubanks began to explore how his parents were placed on the list. His search eventually led him to retrace his Mississippi childhood, a process described in the compelling new book, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past (Basic, $26, 256 pages, ISBN 0738205702). A combination of memoir and political history, Eubanks’ book is by turns a charming remembrance of a rural boyhood and a chilling reminder of racism’s legacy.

Eubanks’ personal narrative about growing up in the segregated South turns conventional perception on its head. He actually had, to a large degree, an idyllic childhood on a farm outside Mount Olive, Mississippi. His sheltered world was shattered only when his class became the first to integrate the local school.

The search for the truth about his parents (placed on the watch list only because they were educated black people) leads Eubanks to his own reconciliation with the world he left behind a quarter of century before. Eventually, he answers his children’s questions about Mississippi by taking a family trip to the state and reconnecting them to the rural roots that are an integral part of his character.

While Eubanks was reading Faulkner, Peggy Morgan was living a Faulkner novel. Writer Carolyn Haines chronicles this Mississippi woman’s life in My Mother’s Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story. Like Ever Is a Long Time, this is a book about the search for truth and the courage to confront it. Poor, white and uneducated, Morgan grew up in a large family dominated by an abusive, alcoholic father. In the social strata of the old South, only blacks were lower than Morgan’s family. Haines, a former journalist who has written numerous novels, portrays Morgan’s struggles to overcome the abuse that followed her from childhood into her own marriage with Lloyd Morgan, which eventually ended in abandonment and disaster.

Morgan and her mother each held a secret related to the civil rights struggle. According to Morgan, her mother died carrying the knowledge of who killed Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago who was lynched in 1955 after allegedly whistling at a white woman. Morgan herself had information about the murder of Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader who was shot to death in his own driveway. It took more than 30 years for her to summon the courage to testify against Byron De La Beckwith, who was finally convicted of Evers’ murder in 1994.

Haines’ crisp, readable account is an inspiring look at one woman’s effort to conquer the pain and hatred that marked her youth. Read together, these two books provide a rich context for understanding the segregated South and the power that race held in creating its structure. J. Campbell Green is a Nashville businessman.

Who will enjoy reading Savage Beauty, the passionate biography of poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay? Just about anybody who remembers the poet’s name from high school English class. Readers will be shocked and fascinated to learn of Millay’s complex, controversial life. Biographer Nancy Milford, who wrote the million-selling Zelda, gained exclusive access to the thousands of papers that belong to Millay’s estate and spent 30 years compiling the details into the compassionate, resonant portrait that is Savage Beauty. Born into extreme poverty and virtually deserted by both parents, the brilliant young Millay was sponsored at Vassar by a wealthy matron. At college, the misbehaving, promiscuously bisexual young seductress (friends called her Vincent) became a nationally acclaimed poet. By age 28, she had published 77 poems over a three-year span, all the while conducting casual affairs with many of her editors. Millay’s intense friendships with famous people, her sold-out poetry performances, her rock star fame (her collection Fatal Interview sold 33,000 copies in 10 weeks during the height of the Depression) make this biography a compelling one. In 1923, she married Eugen Boissevain, an aristocratic Dutchman. Though the famous Millay strove for a quieter image, privately, she and Boissevain had an open marriage. She wrote best when fueled by infatuation and began an intense affair, a liaison Boissevain attempted to turn into a menage `a trois.

The first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, in the end, Millay succumbed to years of illness and gin and morphine. She died in 1949 of a broken neck from a fall down a flight of stairs at Steepletop, her beloved home. A new volume of her verse from the Modern Library, edited by Milford, quotes the poet on the timeless appeal of her own work. I think people like my poetry because it is mostly about things that anybody has experienced, she says. You can just sit in your farmhouse, or your home anywhere, and read it and know you’ve felt the same thing yourself. Who will enjoy reading this tragic, engrossing biography? The simpler question is, who won’t?

Mary Carol Moran is the author of Clear Soul: Metaphors and Meditations, (Court Street Press). She teaches the Novel Writers’ Workshop at Auburn University.

When Hubert H. McAlexander, a professor at the University of Georgia, first told Peter Taylor he wanted to be his biographer, Taylor replied, Oh, no, I haven’t had a very interesting life. But Taylor, a 20th century master of the short story and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, in fact had many fascinating stories to tell.

As McAlexander relates in Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life, Taylor (1917-1994) was personally engaging, a keen observer of humankind who was devoted to his art. The future author was born in Trenton, a small town in western Tennessee, where his father was an attorney and politician. Soon the family moved to the city first to Nashville, then to St. Louis and Memphis. Early on, Peter developed a strong historical consciousness and literary bent. After studying at Southwestern (now Rhodes College) and Vanderbilt, he went to Kenyon College because John Crowe Ransom, a professor, poet, critic and founder of the Kenyon Review, was there. Ransom was primarily interested in poetry, and years later Taylor acknowledged that Ransom’s teaching him so much about the compression of poetry was what led him to be a short story writer rather than a novelist. At Kenyon, he developed life-long friendships with Robert Lowell, his roommate, and Randall Jarrell, who would later be a teaching colleague in North Carolina. Taylor is often referred to as a Southern or regional author. In that regard, it is interesting to follow his development as a writer and as a teacher of writing not only in the South, but also at Ohio State, Kenyon and Harvard. About his own fiction Taylor once wrote, In my stories, politics and sociology are only incidental, often only accidental. I make the same use of them that I do of customs, manners, household furnishings, or anything else that is part of our culture. But the business of discovery of the real identity of the images that present themselves is the most important thing about writing fiction. Ultimately it is the discovery of what life is all about. Anyone interested in 20th century literary history will find McAlexander’s book an absorbing work. His beautifully rendered biography should inspire readers to read or reread Taylor’s elegantly executed fiction.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Part travelogue, part political treatise, Finding George Orwell in Burma traces Orwell’s experiences in 20th-century Burma while keenly observing the realities of daily existence under the brutal dictatorship that rules the country today. Asian-born American journalist Emma Larkin (a pseudonym used to protect her ability to continue reporting) follows the footsteps of the dystopian author’s formative years as a policeman in Burma in the 1920s. Along the way she discovers how much the Southeast Asian country’s repressive leadership has patterned itself after the ruthless regimes of Orwell’s fiction.

Larkin, who speaks fluent Burmese, sprinkles her eyewitness reports on the villages and neighborhoods of Orwell’s in-country years with passages from his first novel, Burmese Days, and his more famous works Animal Farm and 1984.

Daily life in Burma (Larkin never refers to it as Myanmar, a name given it by the generals in power as a way of rewriting history) is difficult. Inflation and corruption are rampant, free speech and a free press are nonexistent, and spies for military intelligence hover everywhere. Torture, imprisonment and disappearance are common, even for minor infractions. Despite grinding poverty, unemployment and lack of basic human rights, the Burmese people Larkin describes are optimistic about their future, bolstered by secret libraries of banned literature, clandestine meetings and hushed discussions with the occasional foreigner.

Larkin’s dispassionate prose sketches a portrait which is instructive but never maudlin, enlightened but not judgmental about the Burmese people’s reactions to their plight. After all, as they say, it can’t really get any worse. Readers of Finding George Orwell in Burma will soon come to understand why Orwell is revered there as a prophet. Kelly Koepke is a freelance writer in Albuquerque.

Jack Burns, the protagonist of John Irving’s 11th novel, Until I Find You, is a successful movie actor trained to focus on his audience of one, for him the father who left his mother before Jack was born. The novel traces Jack’s quest to discover the true story of what happened between his parents, not what he thinks he remembers or what he’s been told by his mother, a second-generation tattoo artist living in Toronto. Jack attends a formerly all-girls school where his father taught. There, he is abused by the older girls (older women will always define Jack’s life) and he begins to act, often playing a woman (another recurring theme). People who knew his father, an organ-playing tattoo addict who looked exactly like Jack, seem to be waiting for the day when Jack’s personality will resemble his, too. Because of this, Jack vows not to have children until he has proof his father had a child he didn’t leave. He is a rich, famous actor but has no real relationships with women other than a longtime friend and his therapist.

This dense novel (by far Irving’s longest) is dark in many places, dealing with sexual molestation, prostitution, the damage caused by the absence of a parent, death and Hollywood scandal and spanning Canada, the U.S., several North Sea countries and the intricately painted worlds of tattooing, organ music and acting. As in all of Irving’s books, the characters are strikingly real in their flaws and lovability, and they have something to say to everyone about the way the stories we tell ourselves and the stories others tell us combine to make the truth of who we are.

This book is not a fast read, or an easy one, but Irving’s fans have always proved up to a challenge. This story will not disappoint them. Sarah E. White is a writer and editor in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Compared to Dr. Paul Farmer, Mother Teresa was a slacker. But she had better PR. That may change with the publication of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s engaging biography of the selfless, tireless, good-humored and still relatively young physician. Kidder, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Soul of a New Machine (1981), has been following the 44-year-old Farmer’s work on behalf of the poor since 1994.

Born in Massachusetts, Farmer grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where his family lived on an old bus and a salvaged boat. Despite these privations, he graduated at the top of his high school class and won a full scholarship to Duke University. While pursuing his degree there, he became interested in public health policies, particularly as they affected the downtrodden. Farmer began working with the poor in Haiti in 1983, the year before he entered Harvard Medical School. There, he met Ophelia Dahl, the daughter of actress Patricia Neal and writer Roald Dahl, who was working as a volunteer at an eye clinic. She would later bring her considerable administrative skills to the service of Farmer’s far-ranging vision. Farmer’s passion for helping the helpless also caught the attention of Boston philanthropist Tom White, who donated money for a clinic in the central Haitian village of Cange and set up the Partners in Health charity to help Farmer fund his projects. For his part, Farmer contributed both his own income and around-the-clock attention to his patients, whether in Boston or Haiti. On the faculty at Harvard, he soon rose to the post of professor of medicine and medical anthropology. Kidder accompanies Farmer as he trudges across the unforgiving Haitian countryside to care for patients or as he attends public health conferences and strategy sessions in Russia, Cuba, France, Peru, Canada and Mexico. Farmer’s amalgam of commitment, genius and energy constitutes a near irresistible force, and Kidder’s wonderful book is an antidote for cynics.

Juvenile offenders find release in a creative writing class Having already found that teaching creative writing to college students was a dismal experience, best-selling author Mark Salzman was even less disposed to try it with the young offenders incarcerated at Los Angeles’ Central Juvenile Hall. But at the urging of a friend, he finally gave in. It was a decision that altered his life. Salzman recounts his experiences in True Notebooks, which offers a powerful narrative covering only his first year of teaching at the detention facility 1997-98 although he stayed on for four years before leaving to take care of his newborn daughter.

True Notebooks introduces a gallery of colorful young felons locked up for murder, robbery and assault, some of whom are now serving life sentences. They are a scheming, affectionate, curious and volatile bunch with plenty of stories to tell not all of them sad ones. Surprisingly, Salzman took to them immediately. Speaking to BookPage from his home in Los Angeles after he put his daughter down for her afternoon nap Salzman admits, “I’m currently a stay-at-home dad. My project is exploring this whole parenthood thing. I think that once my daughter is old enough to go to school, that’s when I’ll want to go back to teaching.” Before accepting his teaching post, Salzman made a list of the reasons he shouldn’t sign on at the hall. He had been bullied as a child and mugged and robbed as an adult. Besides, he wrote to himself, “[I] feel uncomfortable around teenagers.” Despite these reservations, he says the students won him over with their first writing assignment: “I was a very easy sell partly because I was just so surprised at what they were writing about and the way they were writing. As I mention in the book, I had done some creative-writing teaching before at the college level, and it was frustrating because so few of the students were willing to write about things that mattered to them personally. But these kids were writing about their deepest fears, their happiest moments, their worst moments. It was so immediately interesting. They were writing with such directness that I just couldn’t believe how much I was enjoying hearing them read. So from there on, it was pretty easy for me to want to keep coming back.” Salzman recreates the events and conversations of specific classes from memory but salts them with generous samplings of his students’ stories, essays and poems. As the students’ and his own confidence grows, he involves himself more deeply in their lives intervening with their supervisors, planning and conducting a retreat, going to their parties, even attending a trial. In an especially touching scene, he plays his cello for a school assembly, opening with Camille Saint-Saens’ “The Swan,” which, he tells the students, reminds him of his mother. “[As the song progressed] I glanced at the audience and saw a roomful of boys with tears running down their faces . . . A moment later the applause became deafening. It was a mediocre cellist’s dream come true. . . . For my next piece, I chose a saraband from one of the Bach suites. The boys rewarded me with another round of applause, but then someone shouted, Play the one about mothers again,’ and a cheer rose up from the crowd. I realized then that it was the invocation of motherhood, not my playing, that had moved the inmates so deeply.” The author whose earlier books include Iron ∧ Silk, a memoir of his experience as an English teacher in China, and Lying Awake, a critically acclaimed novel about a Los Angeles monastery reveals to his class at one point that his editor has rejected his latest manuscript. The students are outraged. “She don’t know you,” a boy named Francisco shouts. “She don’t know you come down here and help us out, she don’t know shit.” Recalling the “dark pleasure” of that incident, Salzman muses, “There was nothing better than shipping off the manuscript [for True Notebooks] and knowing that my editor was going to read that chapter. In fact, I thought about asking Knopf, when they sent out review copies, to highlight that chapter so that anyone who criticizes me is going to have a whole army of criminals angry at them.” The triumphs Salzman and his students achieved in the classroom were routinely leavened with defeats. “Generally what happened in the time I would work with them which, on average, was about a year was that just when I felt they were getting confident, they were given their prison sentences and shipped out.” Salzman says his friends would ask him why he wasn’t spending his time working with children who could still be saved. “The best answer I could come up with,” he says, “is that life does this to us. We find ourselves unexpectedly in situations where we discover that we’re kind of good at something. And I think there’s a place for just following your instincts and sticking with something you have a positive feeling about.” The affection he developed for his students ultimately persuaded Salzman to have children of his own: “I had a very happy childhood and a loving family,” he says, “but having children was something I could never picture myself doing. I drew a blank when I tried to picture it. So I thought that was a sign that maybe I just wasn’t meant to be a father, that I wouldn’t be good at it. But once I met these kids, the opposite was true, even with all of their problems. I felt such deep satisfaction with our little triumphs. The bond that we did make was so satisfying, so inherently good and positive that I thought, Wow, if this is how I feel about these guys, think of how I’d feel with my own child.’ And that certainly has been true so far.” Edward Morris writes from Nashville.