Retell Lecture

Wilson came then from a different world and he became the focal point of a broad mainstream American culture that thought that modern literature and wanted modern literature to be able to be read and appreciated by ordinary people, they were not modernists in an abstract sense, and certainly some of them like TS Eliot and Faulkner were too difficult for some of their writing to be read by ordinary people, but this was a world before the division between the brows or between a lead or whatever had established itself as part of our consciousness. Wilson was a major player in the successful effort of his generation to establish at the heart of American life and innovative literature that would equal the great cultures of Europe and he knew that the great cultures of Europe were there, he was not a product of a narrow American Studies kind of training at all. He joined a high artistic standard with an openness to all experience and a belief that literature was as much as a part of life for everyone as conversation, he thought that Proust and Joyce and Yeats and Eliot could and should be read by ordinary Americans and helped that to happen. Wilson was a very various man over a period of almost 50 years, he was a dedicated a literary journalist, an investigative reporter, a brilliant memoirist and dedicated journal keeper, his biography, biographical histories to the Finland station and patriotic gore are profoundly influential with Americans today.