The Cape as evoked and experienced by a legendary literary couple

Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) and Mary McCarthy (1912–1989), famed authors, literary critics, libertines, and leftists, were married for seven years and had one child together, Reuel K. Wilson. While bringing forward new biographical revelations, as well as texts that have never been published before, Reuel K. Wilson chronicles his parents’ lives on Cape Cod, together and apart, while examining their relationships with the landscape around them, both human and physical. The book combines biography, cultural history, and literary analysis in an effort to, as the author writes, “impart a sense of the two protagonists’ flesh, blood, nerves, and determination to make an artistic synthesis from observation and experience. If they recreate the place, my role has been to recreate them in it.”

REUEL K. WILSON is the son of renowned literary critic Edmund Wilson and the writer Mary McCarthy. Now retired from teaching Russian, Polish, and Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, he is the author of The Literary Travelogue (2007) and Poland’s Caribbean Tragedy (1986) and numerous articles, including portions of this material in The Paris Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Cape Cod Voice. He maintains a part-time residence in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod.

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