A sorry fate is overtaking the reputation of Edmund Wilson. Since his death … there has been an increasing tendency to portray Wilson as the Grand Cham of American letters, a venerable sage whose most impromptu and trivial scribbles must be embalmed in print and enshrined for all eternity. Ironically, Wilson had himself initiated this reverential salvage operation with the publication of A Prelude, in 1967; it began with the precocious diary, "My Trip Abroad," written when he was thirteen years old, and moved through the "landscapes, characters and conversations from the earlier years of my life" recorded in his day-to-day journal through the end of his military service in the First World War. He was preparing The Twenties for publication at the time of his death.

As a young man of letters, Wilson had been scornful of such indiscriminate sanctimony toward the scratch-pad detritus of great writers, whose notes...