The higher jazz

the long version

Edmund Wilson, the preeminent American literary critic of the first half of the twentieth century, often fretted that he was not taken seriously as a creative writer. Though he completed in draft this short novel, now entitled The Higher Jazz, it was never published. In mid-career, in 1939, Wilson planned a novel in three parts that would carry a man through fifteen years as a stockbroker, a Russian diplomat, and a writer. When he started on the first section of this book, set in the 1920s, it carried him away from his original project. His hero was instead transformed into a German American businessman who, aspiring to become a composer, seeks the spirit of America in music that combined the contemporary popular and the modern classical, in what Wilson called elsewhere "the higher jazz." This portrayal of the 1920s provides a sense of the elusive glories of the Boom Era. Neale Reintz has edited The Higher Jazz for the general reader. His introduction sets the novel in the historical context of Wilson's life and writings, and his annotations explain the topical references and, more important, illustrate Wilson's method of composition.