Edmund Wilson (1895 - 1972) was the most prodigious man of letters of this century, carrying on the cultural and critical tradition of Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold. His erudition, industry, subtlety, acerbity, and analytical power made him stand alone among scholar-writer-journalists. This biography traces the evolution of the priggish young scholar, whom E. E. Cummings called "the man with the iron necktie," into a Churchillian potentate with the fine features of a Roman senator. After his studies at Princeton, where he became the lifelong friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his army service in France, Wilson returned home to become and remain a freelance writer. He worked as a theater critic, a book editor for The New Republic, and a cultural critic for The New Yorker. His four wives included Mary McCarthy, who savaged him in A Charmed Life, and he had numerous affairs, which he described in his journals in vivid and anatomical detail. Wilson, who fearlessly learned Greek, Russia