My Distant Relative, Cousin Edmund Wilson

An Army wound-dresser in World War I in France, writer Edmund Wilson said ``the war made me see. . . that respectable life is a living death.'' His parents' example may have had something to do with that observation, as well. In any case, through a life that ended in 1972, he managed to do exactly what he wanted to do most of the time. That was read, write, drink and fornicate. He married four times - writer Mary McCarthy was No. 3 - and had dozens of liaisons that he chronicled in a clinically detailed diary.

He seems to have possessed outsized appetites - for drink, work, sex and intellectual stimulation. He pursued topics that caught his imagination with the same zeal that he pursued women. To be free to do so, he was prepared to sacrifice steady income. He lived in a succession of squalid, rented rooms until an inheritance in his 50s allowed him to own a home. For seven years, he simply ceased paying income tax. When the Internal Revenue Service caught up with him and assessed a whopping penalty, he attacked them in a blistering polemic - The Cold War and the Income Tax.

Wilson was a longtime contributor to the New Republic, the Nation and The New Yorker. He hated teaching, was no good at it, and scorned most academics as timid and conventional. His work ethic amazed colleagues. Though he drank excessively for decades, he was at his desk each morning pushing forward. Once a subject possessed him, he'd consume all the available literature until he knew more than the professionals, then write his piece. Often, it was the last word."