Edmund Wilson was the best of modern American literary critics. But good literary critics are plentiful, common as lichens on an academic wall; Wilson became a great American writer because he was more than a critic of books, he was a critic of the state, of society, of organized religion, of modern civilization. It is the grandeur of Wilson’s vision that makes him a scandal to our literary courtiers queuing in the Rose Garden for their turn to kiss the First Lady’s foot.

Here is Wilson in Patriotic Gore (1962), one of his best books. Try to imagine any prominent American author of the 1980s writing such words:

We Americans, whose public officials keep telling us we live in the “Free World,”…are expected to pay staggering taxes of which…70 percent goes not only for nuclear weapons capable of depopulating whole countries but also for bacteriological and biological ones which make it possible for us to poison the enemy with every abominable disease from pneumonia and encephalitis to anthrax, cholera, diphtheria and typhoid…. If we refuse to contribute to these researches we can be fined and clapped into jail…. We are, furthermore, like the Russians, being spied upon by an extensive secret police, whose salaries we are required to pay, as we pay also the salaries of another corps of secret agents infiltrating foreign countries. And while all this expenditure is going on for the purpose of sustaining the United States as a more and more unpopular world power, as few funds as possible are supplied to educate and civilize the Americans themselves, who at worst live a life of gang warfare…in the buried slum streets of cities outside of which they can imagine no other world…while others find little spur to ambition when they emerge from four years in college to face two years in the armed services in preparation for further large-scale wars for which few feel the slightest enthusiasm.

Before Vietnam: imagine what Edmund Wilson would say were he alive today.

Wilson was never totally alone in his role as social critic. I have named Kurt Vonnegut, humanist and humorist in the Mark Twain tradition, whose work as a whole is alive with moral purpose. Remember the conclusion to his novel Deadeye Dick: “You want to know something? We are still living in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages—they haven’t ended yet.”

There are others in the guard of honor, contemporary American authors whose books serve well as living in-print examples of what I am trying to say: Robert Coover, The Public Burning—a three-ring circus of a novel inspired by the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs; William Gaddis, JR—a maddening, hilarious, damning description of blind greed disguised as free enterprise; Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow—a vast lament for humanity trapped in the engine room of our runaway technology; DeLillo, Ratner’s Star—a satire on astrophysics, particle physics and contemporary mathe-metaphysics. And Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, the toughest analysis yet of the corporate mentality and the effect of such a mindset upon human life.