The Shores of Light was published by Farrar, Straus and Young in 1952, gathering Wilson’s literary journalism from the two decades when American literature was being transformed by modernism, the Depression, and the political crises of the 1930s. The book runs to nearly 800 pages and covers virtually every important American and European writer of the period: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Cummings, Stein, Proust, Joyce, Yeats, and dozens of lesser figures who receive as much critical attention as their more famous contemporaries.
Wilson was the last American critic to command the entire field of contemporary literature. He read fiction, poetry, drama, history, biography, and philosophy with equal facility; he was fluent in French, Russian, Italian, German, and Hebrew; and he had personal relationships with most of the writers he reviewed. This combination of range, erudition, and social access gave his criticism a depth and authority that no subsequent American critic has matched.
The book is organized chronologically, and reading it straight through is like watching the intellectual history of the interwar period unfold in real time. Wilson’s early reviews — of Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, of Hemingway’s first stories, of Cummings’s poetry — capture the excitement of discovering major talents before the literary establishment had recognized them. His 1930s pieces — on proletarian literature, on the political uses of art, on the relationship between criticism and ideology — document the most intense period of political engagement in American literary history.
The individual essays are consistently brilliant. Wilson’s review of The Great Gatsby — written in 1925, when the novel was a commercial failure — is one of the earliest recognitions of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. His portrait of Edna St. Vincent Millay captures both the enchantment and the sadness of the most popular poet of the 1920s. His essay on the Marxist literary critics is a model of fair-minded analysis that takes the Marxist project seriously while exposing its limitations.
The title comes from The Divine Comedy — the shores of light are the shores of Purgatory, where Dante sees the dawn after his journey through Hell — and it suggests Wilson’s own sense that the literature of the interwar period, for all its darkness, was illuminated by genuine creative achievement.
Collecting The Shores of Light
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Young, New York, 1952): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $10–$20
- Later editions: $5–$10