Edmund Wilson and the Sea Slugs

There are ways in which Patriotic Gore is a masterpiece. As an evocation of the literary and intellectual figures whose experience was shaped by the Civil War, the book is Plutarchian in its vividness. It displays to full advantage Wilson’s gifts for historical narrative and critical description; it moves from writer to writer, topic to topic, with an ease that is astonishing; it vibrates with the passions of a supreme national crisis. But since all this has already been said b...