Quotes About Edmund Wilson

with which we have attempted to clothe it; I am trying — as in the book that follows — to remove the whole subject from the plane of morality and to give an objective account of the expansion of the United States.

classic (though one that I cannot help thinking a little overrated), and there is no point in describing her poetry here.

Now, aside from this self-confident ambition, what kind of man was Lincoln? There has undoubtedly been written about him more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe;

The only thing New Yorkers ignore more than nature is history. They have a habit of not spending a great deal of time pondering the history of their city. That is because of a sense that it has always been more or less the same, or, as Edmund Wilson, one of the more venerated New Yorker writers of that magazine's heyday, explained his waning enthusiasm for reading history in his old age, "I know more or less the kind of things that happen.