The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960-1972

By: Lewis M. Dabney and Edmund O. Wilson

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Synopsis: Edited by Wilson's biographer, this volume poignantly -- and defiantly -- records the final years of one of our foremost critics and writers, taking its place alongside his major works, including "To the Finland Station", "Patriotic Gore", "The Shores of Light, and Letters on Literature and Politics", as an enduring contribution to American culture. In "The Sixties" Wilson also struggles with his aging, as intellectual and personal curiosity contend against weakening physical powers, and flirtations that afford a sense of biological revival strain his relationship with his wife, Elena. He watches his children establishing their own lives and is aware of unfulfilled relationships with them. Yet, as he plunges into the contemporary scene of art, thought, and public affairs, the pull of his personal and cultural past is strengthened by the sense of his approaching end. Witnessing his own foibles and the ironies of human nature, expressing feeling more deeply than he often had in his journal, he writes his account of this decade with a concentration undiluted by other large-scale projects. The extraordinary personal record begun in another pivotal period in American life, with "The Twenties", comes to a fitting culmination in "The Sixties".