Wilson, a heavy drinker, certainly had a melancholy streak, a contentious character and a frightening demeanor. All this helps make him a fascinating man. But Wilson also had extraordinarily wide interests and ranged far beyond literature. He wrote about art, theater, music, film, popular culture as well as political events, foreign travel, the revolutionary tradition in Europe, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Zuni and Iroquois Indians, the American Civil War, the culture and politics of Canada. He was the master of the biographical essay and the autobiographical memoir, and was the greatest diarist of his time. Far from fading into obscurity and being ignored by contemporary readers, eleven of his fifty books are still in print, and his publishers have brought out eleven new works since his death -- more than most living authors have written in the last twenty years. - Preface.