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 Valery, 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.