Axel's Castle

Published in 1931 Axel''s Castle was Edmund Wilson''s first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats Paul Valéry T. S. Eliot Marcel Proust James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote Wilson was an original an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer.