The Sixtiesr

This fifth and final installment of Wilson's journal is at once curiously detached from the 1960s (JFK's assassination gets a single bitter paragraph) and a barometer of that decade's convulsions and of the unraveling of the social fabric. Riddled with passages of great beauty and self-revelation, this hectic daybook is the most wide-ranging of Wilson's journals, covering his movements from his old stone house in upstate New York to teaching at Harvard to New York City, as well as trips to Canada, Hungary, Paris, London, Israel, Jordan. A vast humming collage, the diary is full of encounters with the likes of Stravinsky, Auden, Anais Nin, James Baldwin, George Kennan and Andre Malraux. Wilson, who died in 1972 at age 77, unveils his fulfilling relationship with fourth wife Elena Thornton and documents the emotional collapse of his daughter Rosalind, who had been raised by Wilson's mother. Dabney, who edited The Portable Edmund Wilson , has provided a useful introduction and more than 140 section headings that lend coherence to Wilson's musing on literature, politics and the intellectual scene. (July)