A Piece of My Mind was published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy in 1956, when Wilson was sixty-one and at the height of his reputation. The book is neither criticism nor journalism but something rarer in Wilson’s work: personal essay, in which the author drops the critical mask and speaks directly about his beliefs, experiences, and preoccupations. The result is the closest thing Wilson ever wrote to a spiritual autobiography.
The book is organized around a series of topics — religion, the United States, sex, war, education, the Jews — and each chapter is a sustained meditation that draws on Wilson’s reading, travel, and personal experience. The chapter on religion is characteristic: Wilson, an atheist since his Princeton days, examines the religious impulse with the same seriousness he brought to literary modernism, arguing that the decline of Christian belief in the West had left a vacuum that neither science nor politics could fill. He was not advocating a return to faith — his skepticism was too deep for that — but acknowledging the loss.
The chapters on the United States are both patriotic and despairing. Wilson loved America — its landscape, its variety, its democratic traditions — but he was appalled by its commercialism, its philistinism, and its imperial ambitions. He saw the Cold War as a catastrophe for American civilization, militarizing the culture and corrupting the language of politics. These passages, written in 1956, anticipate the critiques that the 1960s counterculture would make more noisily a decade later.
The chapter on sex is remarkably frank for its era. Wilson writes about his own sexual history — three marriages, various affairs, the connection between erotic life and creative work — with a directness that was unusual in the 1950s and that reflects his lifelong conviction that sex was a proper subject for serious writing, not a topic to be left to the pornographers and the prudes.
The book sold well but received mixed reviews. Some critics found Wilson’s opinions on non-literary subjects less interesting than his literary criticism; others admired the book’s intellectual honesty and personal courage. In retrospect, A Piece of My Mind is one of Wilson’s most appealing books — the one in which the formidable critic reveals himself as a vulnerable, complicated, and genuinely thoughtful human being.
Collecting A Piece of My Mind
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, New York, 1956): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $8–$15
- Later editions: $5–$10