The Triple Thinkers was first published by Harcourt, Brace in 1938 and substantially revised and expanded in a second edition by Oxford University Press in 1948. The title refers to a passage in Shaw’s Man and Superman about thinking beyond the conventional and the unconventional to a third level of understanding, and Wilson applies this principle to a dozen literary subjects that he treats with the seriousness, independence, and range that made him the dominant American critic of his generation.
The essays cover an extraordinary range. “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” argues that the novel has displaced poetry as the primary literary form because prose can absorb the functions that verse once performed — narrative, drama, description, meditation — while verse has retreated to a narrow domain of lyric expression. “The Ambiguity of Henry James” (one of the most influential essays ever written about James) proposes that The Turn of the Screw is a study not of genuine ghosts but of a sexually repressed governess’s hallucinations — a reading that ignited a critical debate that continues to this day. “Marxism and Literature” surveys the relationship between socialist politics and literary criticism with a balance that satisfies neither doctrinaire Marxists nor anti-communist purists.
The essay on Pushkin — “In Honor of Pushkin” — is remarkable for its time: Wilson, who read Russian fluently, presented Pushkin to American readers not as a foreign curiosity but as one of the supreme poets in any language, and his close readings of Eugene Onegin anticipate the much more famous (and contentious) debate that Vladimir Nabokov would provoke with his literal translation two decades later.
Wilson’s critical method in these essays combines several approaches that academic criticism usually keeps separate: close reading of texts, biographical analysis, historical contextualization, and independent aesthetic judgment. He writes about literature the way a cultivated, intelligent person thinks about it — not as a professional academic performing a methodology but as a reader bringing everything he knows to bear on the question of what a work of art means and why it matters. This is why Wilson’s criticism has survived the various academic fashions that have risen and fallen since his time: it is addressed to readers, not to other critics.
Collecting The Triple Thinkers
First edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1938): Cloth, dust jacket. Ten essays.
Revised edition (Oxford University Press, New York, 1948): Twelve essays, substantially rewritten. This is the preferred edition.
Market values:
- 1938 first edition in dust jacket: $60–$150
- 1948 revised edition in jacket: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$15