THE HISTORICAL ROMANCE.(writing of 'To The Finland Station' by Edmund Wilson)

The idea for "To the Finland Station"came to Edmund Wilson while he was walking down a street in the East Fifties one day, in the depths of the Great Depression. Wilson was in his late thirties. He had established himself as a critic and reporter with the publication of "Axel's Castle,"a study of modernist writers, in 1931, and "The American Jitters,"a collection of pieces based on visits he made to mines and factories, in 1932. His ambition, though, was to write a novel. (An early effort, "I Thought of Daisy,"had appeared in 1929; it was not a success.) So he was a little surprised to find himself contemplating an ambitious history of socialist and communist thought, ...