Let's say up front that I like the book but not the man described therein. Which is not to say that that man is not interesting.

His father was a district attorney whose everyday conversation style carried over from the courtroom, and his mother was hard of hearing; consequently his own conversational style was loud and hectoring. His reputation as America's twentieth century man of letters perhaps explains his large number of sexual partners which continued to increase well up into his seventies. His promiscuous appetite for sex and alcohol was only exceeded by his love for writing and literary reputation. His high output, however, is at least partially explained by anthologizing and repackaging. He was consistently a critical but not a commercial success.

Physically he was a sorry specimen, never learning to drive and failing to even hit the target during military marksmanship training. His diet left him pot bellied by his thirties and the only time he drove a motorcycle ended in accident and citation if not arrest. The author regards as apocryphal that he once leapt a somersault while waiting for an elevator.

Despite at least two trips to the Soviet Union in the 1930s he only reluctantly acknowledged its social reality in the 1960s. Conversely his service as a U. S. Army medic well behind the front lines in WWI France left him a lifetime pacifist even after the invasion of Russia in 1941.

The book has a number of humorous anecdotes although not enough for 483 pages of text. One of the most revealing was that he hired a taxi to take him from his home in Cape Cod to John Dos Passos' in northern Virginia. Once there Wilson refused to sit at the dinner table with the taxi driver. (The black cook refused to allow a white man to eat in the kitchen.) Wilson had never forgiven Dos Passos for turning against Communism in the 1930s anyway and they never saw each other again after that visit.

Summers he would leave Cape Cod and spend them in his gloomy and secluded ancestral (as he thought of it) home near Utica, New York. Unsurprising his wife refused to accompany him.

A good deal of the text is literary comment and criticism. Occasionally I got the impression the author was being more tactful than candid. ( )

This is a first rate biography, which I am re-reading, of America's 20th century man of letters and one of the premiere reviewers of literature, life, and culture. I never met Wilson, but I had the good fortune of having a long-lived friend, Selden Rodman (1910-2002), another man of letters, who did. When I asked him what "Bunny" was like, he said, "He was like a snapping turtle." I never knew that Wilson was also friends with Stephen Spender as I would have asked him about Wilson, too, when I socialized with him, briefly, at UConn in the 80s. ( )

Extremely thorough. I read this since I was always curious who Wilson was and didn't really know. I found out. I gave it four stars because it is an extremely well-researched biography, but in the end, I didn't particularly like the man and, frankly, wasn't convinced of his importance. ( )