The leading literary critic Edmund Wilson shares his travels and adventures from his young life in this intellectual autobiography, A Prelude. From his early childhood in Red Bank, New Jersey, to his undergraduate years in Princeton, to his later time spent in the army, this personal study, told partly in diary form, provides an illuminating look inside the mind of one of the twentieth century's towering man of letters. Also included in this volume is two short stories by Wilson, both based on actual events: "The Death of a Soldier," about the death of a young soldier from pneumonia just before going to the front. And "Lieutenant Franklin" concerning a young officer in the Army of Occupation in Germany after the war.