The American literary critic and journalist Edmund Wilson was born May 8, 1895, at Red Bank in the Atlantic Highlands–Asbury Park angle of the New Jersey coast, a district originally composed of independent towns and villages but during his early life being steadily absorbed into the suburban, summer-resort sprawl of metropolitan New York. The transformation seems prophetic; it presents in miniature the pattern of all those developments and changes in society at large which have produced the distrustful outlook on modern progress that Wilson has held to most of his life. One may feel that this outlook was his...