(1895 – 1972) Poet, novelist, journalist and cultural and political essayist, Wilson was one of the most prodigious writers of the twentieth century After attending Princeton University and serving in the First World War, he became a theater critic, a book editor for The New Republic and cultural critic for The New Yorker. During the Depression, he made his name publishing essays such as those found in The American Jitters, which, influenced by post-Second World War anti-communism, he edited and republished as The American Earthquake. His widely acclaimed history of European revolutions, To the Finland Station (1940), highlighted a shift among many American leftists away from socialism to a more pragmatic liberalism, and shaped much of the discussion of Marxism among American intellectuals for about thirty years.