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Release: April 19, 1995
Contact: Justin Harmon (609/258-5732)


Lecture, Conference to Commemorate
Edmund Wilson Centennial

PRINCETON, N.J. -- The American Studies Program at Princeton
University will commemorate the centennial of the literary critic
Edmund Wilson with a public lecture this spring and a scholarly
conference in the fall.

The lecture, "Years of Promise: Edmund Wilson and Princeton," will
be delivered by Lewis Dabney, a professor of English at the
University of Wyoming at Laramie, who is currently completing a
major biography of Wilson. The lecture, on April 26 at 8 p.m. in
Betts Auditorium, is open to the public and free of charge.

Dabney earned his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1953 and his
Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1965. A noted authority on
modern American literature, he is the editor most recently of
Edmund Wilson's =The Sixties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the
Period=, published in 1993.

The conference, "Edmund Wilson at 100: His Life, Work and Legacy,"
is planned for November 17 and 18. It will highlight Wilson's
influence on the so-called New York critics, among others.

Born May 8, 1895, Wilson graduated with Princeton's Class of 1916.
He worked as an associate editor of The New Republic and later as
literary critic for The New Yorker. He established his critical
reputation with Axel's Castle (1931), and cemented it in such
works as =The Triple Thinkers= (1938) and =The Wound and the Bow=
(1941). =To the Finland Station= (1940) offers a history of
socialism and communism and sketches the lives of Marx and Engels,
Lenin and Trotsky. =Patriotic Gore= (1962), a volume based on
scholarly material developed for the Gauss Seminars at Princeton
in 1952, surveys important American literature related to the
Civil War.

Wilson frequently lectured and led seminars at Princeton. He was
awarded an honorary degree by the university in 1956 and the
National Medal for Literature 10 years later. He died in June 12,
1972.

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