Edmund Wilson, a man of idiosyncratic temperament and unpredictable taste, has solidified in retrospect into a marmoreal figure, a sort of jowly Supreme Court justice of the literary imagination, issuing measured opinions from the chambers, successively, of The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. In achieving something like the "consecrated authoritative role" that he ascribed to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the culminating chapter of Patriotic Gore, his marvelous book on the literature arising from the Civil War, Wilson was, as he himself observed, filling his father's shoes. Edmund Wilson Sr. was a gifted courtroom antagonist and gentleman reformer who, as attorney general of New Jersey, had cleaned up the political racket of Atlantic City and sent several hundred men to jail. For this achievement, President Woodrow Wilson, a Jersey man by adoption, had let it be known that a position on the Supreme Court might be in the offing should a vacancy arise.

After his father's death in 1923, Wilson went through his professional papers and realized that his own prose, hammered out on yellow legal pads, owed more to his father's arguments--what he called in a poem "his scornful tone, his eighteenth-century words"--than to Henry James or any of the other writers he was coming to admire. The austere style and capacious scope, the probing for illuminating precedent, the personal touch without personal affect--these were traits of Wilson's book reviews from the start. In a discouraging time like our own, when book reviewing is regarded as the equivalent of a haphazard Consumer Reports for casual readers, it is bracing to read someone for whom the reviewing of books was a central, intellectually rigorous, exciting, and concentrating act of the civilized world.

One might say of Wilson's written opinions what he said of Justice Holmes: "that he never dissociates himself from the great world of thought and art, and that all his decisions are written with awareness of both their wider implications and the importance of their literary form." ...