About the book

"I thought of Daisy" by Edmund Wilson is a novel written in the early 20th century. It traces a young critic’s immersion in Greenwich Village’s bohemian world—its poets, painters, and political talk—through his entanglement with the magnetic poet Rita and his uneasy fascination with the chorus-girl Daisy, whose jealous newspaperman husband embodies a harsher, tabloid America. Themes of love, art, class, and postwar disillusionment thread through intimate scenes, parties, and arguments that test ideals against desire. The opening of the novel follows the narrator to a bright, stylish Village party hosted by Ray and Daisy Coleman, where he meets the small, intense poet Rita, hears her austere, moving verses, and observes the roomful of artists, including a coolly proud stage designer. Ray’s smug tale of catching a thief—and his relish for police brutality—sparks conflict with the narrator’s radical friend Hugo, while Daisy’s charm is shadowed by Ray’s possessiveness and a public quarrel after she slips out for beer with another man. The narrator leaves with Rita; in a taxi and then at his neat apartment, they talk fiercely about art, women’s independence, and the cheapening power of the press, she recites again, and they talk through to dawn, after which he offers her his place to work. A substantial digression sketches Hugo’s history from war service to revolutionary fervor and his fear of bourgeois traps. At the start of the next section, the narrator and two rival admirers help pack Rita’s bare room; a nondescript caller takes money from her, tensions simmer, and Rita—precise and commanding—dictates what will be carried with her as she prepares to move.