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Cover for the book: Edmund Wilson
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Edmund Wilson

Our Neighbor from Talcottville

Richard Hauer Costa

Hardcover $29.95s | 9780815601630Add to cart

Subjects: New York State, biography, literary figures, Lewis County

"Costa portrays an unexpectedly open, accessible man whose bookishness was tempered by a deep affinity for Talcottville and a desire to forge 'human links' there."—Publishers Weekly

Description

For the eminent American literary critic Edmund Wilson, Upstate New York was home. Richard Hauer Costa’s biography of Wilson’s final years, from 1962 to 1972, in Talcottville, NY, combines the literary, the political, and the domestic in an engaging portrait of Wilson as “squierarchical, Dickensian, benevolent.”

Costa shows us a very personal, accessible man as he tells us about Wilson’s opinions, literary and otherwise, his likes and dislikes, his almost spiritual link to Talcottville, his failing health in his final years, his habits (moviegoing) and idiosyncracies (sneakers). What emerges is a profile of Wilson not at all like the stern figure of academic biography.

Also included are interviews Costa conducted after Wilson’s death with noted Upstate novelist Walter D. Edmonds, Canadian writer Morley Callaghan, and Wilson’s Upstate friend, Mary Pcolar.

About the Author

Richard Hauer Costa is professor emeritus of English at Texas A&M University and the author of several books including H. G. Wells and Malcolm Lowry.


Related Interest

Scholar in the Wilderness
From Where We Stand
Tales My Father Never Told

Series: New York State and Regional studies

6 x 9, 192 pages, 3 black and white illustrations, 1 maps

November 1980

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