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From Melancholy to Joy Wake Forest professor's book has provoked heated discussions about whether happiness is the goal of life or an escape from life
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Published: March 2, 2008
Since Eric Wilson's book Against Happiness came out in January, National Public Radio, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, the New York Post, The Vancouver Sun and the London Times have all taken notice.
He has been interviewed. His thoughts have been examined in articles about happiness and in reviews that have run under such headlines as "Please Don't Have a Nice Day" (The Wall Street Journal) and "Don't Worry, Be Unhappy" (New York Post).
Although the only title on the bright yellow dust jacket is Against Happiness, the title page gives a fuller idea of what Wilson, the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University, is up to.
There it says, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.
In the book, Wilson, 40, has much to say about the dangers of what he sees as the American tendency to promote happiness at the cost of such things as seeing life as it truly is and appreciating the value of sadness.
"This is the basis of the American dream: the trading of the quick buzz and hum of the real for the placid structures of sound institutions," he writes. "The dream of the American is the death of the actual."
Wilson writes that melancholy -- which he is careful to differentiate from depression that should be treated -- can provide a richer, more nuanced view of the world and open the door to joy.
The timing of Wilson's book was fortuitous. After he signed a contract for it back in the fall of 2006, the publisher -- Farrar, Straus and Giroux of New York -- found out that a number of books about happiness were coming out in late 2007 and moved up the release date so that it would be released about the same time.
Soon after it came out, the calls started coming. For Wilson's wife, Sandi Hamilton, who routinely prefaces intriguing conversational tidbits with, "On NPR today, I heard…," the interview on National Public Radio was particularly exciting.
The attention -- and subsequent sales -- put the book at No. 13 on the Los Angeles Times nonfiction best-seller list this past weekend, and the publisher has added a second press run of 10,000 copies to the first edition of 7,500. Wilson has also heard from hundreds of individuals who tracked down his e-mail address on the Wake Forest Web site.
The people who have written to him can be divided into two groups, he said, those -- the majority -- who thank him for encouraging them to embrace their melancholy side and those saying some version of "How dare you tell me that I can't be happy."
So far, he said, he has responded to every e-mail. If he were writing the book today, he might ratchet back the anti-happiness part a tad.
"I might have been a little to strong in my criticism of the happy types," he said. "I might have been overly general and possibly unfair."
As for melancholy, Wilson knows it intimately. He has lived with it for much of his life.
"He is the real deal," said Philip Arnold, a longtime friend who is the director of the student union at Appalachian State University.
As Arnold remembers a long-ago conversation that touched on their different perspectives on life, Wilson said "You're just happy and I'm not."
The book is quite personal, Arnold said, and he thinks that Wilson's articulating his thoughts for the book enabled him to clarify his thinking and come to a better understanding of himself.
"When you name something, you have some control over it," he said. "He identified his own issues with those at large."
Hamilton said that many people may be surprised to learn about her husband's melancholy side. In public, she said, he is witty and charming and can seem like an extrovert.
"I think he saves some of his melancholy moods for me," she said.
Hamilton is a nutritionist with Winston-Salem Woman Care. The two married in 1992 and have a 5-year-old daughter, Una.
Wilson doesn't trace his melancholy to a trauma or an unhappy childhood but, to some degree perhaps, a genetic predisposition.
"I have a lot of relatives who have rather melancholy dispositions," he said.
On the outside, his childhood looked just fine. He was social and played football well enough to be recruited to play at West Point. In private, he was someone who enjoyed reading Kafka and sometimes stretched out on the floor of his bedroom and counted the blotches on the ceiling.
"From a young age, I almost felt as if I lived a double life," he said. "I felt like it was weird for me to enjoy those darker moods."
West Point was not the place for him, and he ended up at Appalachian State ,where he graduated summa cum laude in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in English. A master's degree (1990) in English from Wake Forest and doctorate (1996) in English from The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York followed.
He joined the faculty at Wake Forest in 1998 and became Thomas H. Pritchard Professor in 2006. He was the chairman of the English Department for three years before taking leave from that position for this academic year to focus on research. He is now at work on book called, at the moment, Killing Clarity: On the Power of Ambiguity in a Fanatical Age.
Some articles about Against Happiness have described it as controversial, and, although a number of the writers have praised Wilson's perspective, others have been critical. Having written about his personal experience with melancholy can make him vulnerable to the criticisms, Arnold said. "They are attacking his thoughts -- his perspective on how things are."
That side of the experience aside, Wilson is pleased with the attention his work has gotten.
"I feel very fortunate," he said.
He also wants people to know that he is not some curmudgeon opposed to good cheer.
"It's ultimately a book about hope," he said.
■ Kim Underwood can be reached at 727-7389 or at
■ A review of Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy can be found on the Book Page in the Insight section.
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