Edmund Wilson's Traditions in Peril

The Library of America is publishing the critical writings of Edmund Wilson in a two-volume set in October. [The NBCC is sponsoring a panel discussion on Wilson with the Library of America on October 11; more details to come.]

"Literary Essays and Reviews" covers the 1920s through the 1940s, when Wilson was the pre-eminent book critic in the country. He was much more -- a widely traveled journalist and war correspondent whose book, "To The Finland Station," was one of the first histories of the Russian Revolution.

Wilson was also a leftist activist during the 1930s, a chronicler of the early days of the Depression, a playwright, memoir writer and a self-taught expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

No literary form, from the Symbolist poets to mystery novels, was immune from Wilson's analysis. His strong and erudite criticism, written largely for the New Republic and the New Yorker, set a standard for American literary commentary that's seldom approached these days. He died in 1972.

The Library of America plans future editions of Wilson's writings after the 1940s.

Novelist John Updike has followed in Wilson's critical shoes at the New Yorker. A new collection of reviews and remarks, "Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism," will also be released in October.

These upcoming books, while worthy of mention in any event, provide another way to view the growing debate between the print and digital worlds over writing about the arts.

Book blogs proliferate these days, fed by the growing ranks of unemployed newspaper reviewers like Jerome "Book/Daddy" Weeks. Meanwhile, the print media's dedication to criticism grows as thin as objectivity on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel.

Film reviewers were the first to feel the pain of a growing movement in newspapers to concentrate their dwindling resources on local coverage and leave movies to The Associated Press or Roger Ebert.

What's happening across the country from Denver to Atlanta are downsizing and reorganization. Having a film critic, and in Atlanta's case, a book editor, classical music writer, art critic and drama reviewer, is no longer important. "Unique local stories" are.

According to a story in the American Journalism Review, Main Street is where many papers have decided to make their stand, dropping the national entertainment beat and other areas of news.

Sticking with the movie theme, it's like "The Titanic." As the ship nosed headfirst into the sea, the hardier passengers fled to the stern, sending the rest, like the critics, to Davy Jones' locker. Of course, the stern eventually sank, too.

Meanwhile, the bloggers, safe and warm in the Carpathia, continued to flail merrily away on their Internet sites.

"We're the future, if not even the present," they announced, while offering to pick up what few print survivors remained. "We have unlimited space, a wide array of contributors and, what's so cool, links to all the other bloggers out there."

In a lot of cases, there are also no editors or owners to answer to, but generally, the literary blog postings are provocative and fresh, much like Wilson's columns were 60 years ago.

The difference is that Wilson had a context to work in, framed by the well-tested structure of the print world.

It was a world defined by scholarship, relevance, accountability and the tacit understanding between writer and reader that they share a common ground.

I agree with critic Sven Birkerts' argument that the tradition of print -- the responsibility that goes with a finished product, rather than the shifting, 24-hour nature of the Internet -- remains the finest way to explain and preserve our culture.

Unfortunately, the lure of the Web, with its easy, all-access features and its growing influence in American life, has seduced many newspapers and magazines into abandoning what made them successful in the first place -- the singular, identifiable voice of regional columnists and reviewers who know the territory.

It was once feared that the homogenized, trained accents of announcers on network radio would blur regional dialects. It didn't happen. Now, there's a more serious threat to regional culture, as the print media abandons its unique qualities to follow the Pied Piper of cyberspace.--Bob Hoover, Book Editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette