Edmund Wilson isn’t alive to celebrate his 10oth birthday, but his independent genius lives on -and without peer. 

A STOUT, SOLID MAN WITH A STRANGELY high-pitched voice, the literary critic Edmund Wilson was in every way an omnivore. One would be hard-pressed to find someone in American literary history who read, wrote, drank, argued, and seduced as much as he did. “I drank a whole bottle of champagne and what was left of a bottle of Old Grand-dad and started in on a bottle of red wine. I was eating Limburger cheese and ginger snaps,” he wrote of one of his not infrequent binges. “Felt queasy for the next 24 hours.” After four marriages, three children, and a lifetime spent touring the globe, Wilson’s copious journals are proof that he lived life to its fullest: “I couldn’t rush around as much as I usually do,” he wrote, at age 67, of a trip to New York City from his upstate home in Talcottville, “two evenings with the Lowells, two with Mike Nichols, two with the Epsteins… Ved Mehta… William Shawn… Roger Straus …. ” At a time when ordering a lunchtime glass of wine is enough to invite the disapproval of New York’s pallid, fat-free literary society, Wilson’s robust example is needed more than ever. 

It is startling to note that in the 23 years that have elapsed between his death and the 100th anniversary of his birth on May 8, Wilson published more books than most writers produce in a lifetime.  Adding five volumes of journals, three of essays, and two of letters to the roughly 40 books that appeared while Wilson was alive, even from the grave America’s greatest man of letters gives new meaning to “prodigious output.” Wilson was the exemplary generalist, eschewing the path of the dry academic specialist and writing on everything from the origins of Marxism and Modernism to the literature of the Civil War and the fate of the Iroquois, as well as his personal best-seller, Memoirs of Hecate County, a handful of plays, and several books of poetry. The phenomenon of Edmund Wilson is all themore distinctive because there is no one today capable of filling his shoes. Take Yale professor Harold Bloom, art critic Robert Hughes, and John Updike on a good day, roll them all together and maybe you’d have someone approximating Wilson’s scope and depth. 

Wilson invented a genre that might be thought of as “cultural investigative journalism.” Much of his independent genius lay in his talent for satisfying the demands of his public (and thus his publishers) while addressing his own burning intellectual questions. Who else would have taken the discovery of a bunch of ancient parchment manuscripts as inspiration, as Wilson did for what was perhaps his best book, The Scrolls From the Dead Sea? Exploring the historical and theological questions posed by this find with the characteristic vitality that attracted academic and general readers alike, Wilson beat out many scholars and archaeologists by decades. 

As the New Yorker‘s chief book critic beginning in 1944, Wilson surveyed the efforts of novelists, poets, and journalists, savaging those unlucky enough to provoke his ire. “The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth,” he said of Carl Sandburg’s biography. Those he admired, however, benefited from his tremendous generosity, and his praise boosted the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Anais Nin, Randall Jarrell, and Vladimir Nabokov, to name a few. 

This year Wilson is the focus of centennial celebrations ranging from conferences at the Mercantile Library and Princeton (his alma mater) to Jeffrey Meyers’s quickie Edmund Wilson: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin). Lewis Dabney (editor of Wilson’s last volume of journals, The Sixties) is also compiling a massive official account of the critic’s life and work. A dedicated curmudgeon, however; Wilson had little patience for hangers-on of any sort. Considering Wilson’s distrust for most institutions, especially those of academia, it’s ironic to watch the squad of university scholars picking over his remains and producing the very kinds of treatises he would have scorned. After all, this is the man who once said of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, “Not to have been a member is the only distinction in my life that I can be sure of.”