"Edmund Wilson, critic, writer, and diarist extraordinaire, was a literary celebrity of enormous appetite. In his half century as a major force in American letters he not only knew everyone, he seemed to fall in love with most of them." "Who were they? Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; actress Mary Blair; friends, writers, and drinking buddies Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Dawn Powell, and Elinor Wylie; poet Leonie Adams; writer and intellectual Mary McCarthy; Mamaine Paget, later the wife of Arthur Koestler; and screenwriter and journalist Penelope Gilliatt to name only the best known. They appear here as complete portraits, personalities in their own right as well as in the roles they play in Wilson's romantic and sexual biography." "Each woman he came to love was an alluring interpretative problem, an erotic and analytic challenge, a presence that fired his imagination. They came from the Greenwich Village of the 1920s, from his own upper middle class world of privilege, from New York's working class, from the high reaches of literary New York, and from the workaday world of Talcottville in upper New York State." "Wilson's Rabelaisian passions, ardors, and vulnerabilities, complicated by his ideas about love and sex, and marriage, are the ingredients of a story quite singular in modern American culture, wonderfully told in this portrait."--Jacket.