Edmund Wilson 2004 On making his first recumbent bicycle in1955. US literary critic, social commentator, and
novelist. Although his own fiction, plays and poems are now
little read, he was an influential critic with a wide-ranging
perspective on art, history and society.
Edmund Wilson To the Finland Station (1940) [Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1972, ISBN 374-51045-8/1145], Part I, Ch. 5: Michelet Between Nationalism and Socialism, p. 36
Edmund Wilson Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) [New York Review Books Classics, 2004], Ch. 5, p. 340 Karl Marx, in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843-4), wrote "Religion…is the opium of the people" ("Die Religion…ist das Opium des Volkes"). Wilson was not the first writer to turn Marx’s statement on its head: Evelyn Waugh published a review of Harold Laski's Faith, Reason and Civilization in The Tablet, 22nd April 1944, under the headline "Marxism, the Opiate of the People". In 1955 the French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote a book on Marxism called L'Opium des intellectuels. Hence Wilson's line is often attributed to him.
Edmund Wilson Gore Vidal, "Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes," The New York Review of Books (1980-09-25), later published in The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 1976-1982 (1982) [Vintage, 1983, ISBN 0-394-71379-6], p. 32