Background
Lionel Trilling was born on July 4, 1905 in Queens, New York He was the son of Fannie (née Cohen), who was from London, and David Trilling, a tailor from Bialystok in Poland. His family was Jewish.
(The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and in...)
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.
https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Imagination-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590172833?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1590172833
("Now and then," writes Lionel Triling "it is possible to ...)
"Now and then," writes Lionel Triling "it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself." In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life--and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.
https://www.amazon.com/Sincerity-Authenticity-Charles-Norton-Lectures/dp/0674808614?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0674808614
(An anthology of essays, criticism, and reviews, unpublish...)
An anthology of essays, criticism, and reviews, unpublished for fifty years, includes a selection of writings by W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the publications of The Reader's Subscription Book Club and the The Mid-Century Book Society, including Trilling's thoughts on The Wind in the Willows, Auden on drugs and cooking, and Barzun on the work of Robert Lowell. 17,500 first printing.
https://www.amazon.com/Company-Readers-Uncollected-Subscription-Mid-Century/dp/0743202627?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0743202627
(In his tradition, Lionel Trilling takes the reader into t...)
In his tradition, Lionel Trilling takes the reader into the hearts and minds of some of the most well known literary figures and their works, extracting wisdom and expounding to reveal how society can learn and benefit from the study of great literature.
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Culture-Essays-Literature-Learning/dp/0670160911?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0670160911
(The Broken Mirror : A collection of Writings from Contemp...)
The Broken Mirror : A collection of Writings from Contemporary Poland Hardcover Jan 01, 1958 Pawel Mayewski; Lionel Trilling; Tadeusz Rozewicz; Zbigniew Herbert; Leszek Kolakowski; Kazimierz Brandys; Wiktor Woroszylski and Jan Strzelecki
https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Mirror-collection-Writings-Contemporary/dp/B000JL14NM?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000JL14NM
(Content with her life and not interested in marriage, Emm...)
Content with her life and not interested in marriage, Emma Woodhouse, a rich and beautiful heiress, causes complications with her matchmaking schemes.
https://www.amazon.com/Emma-Riverside-Editions-Jane-Austen/dp/0395051150?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0395051150
( Bringing together the thoughts of one of American liter...)
Bringing together the thoughts of one of American literature’s sharpest cultural critics, this compendium will open the eyes of a whole new audience to the work of Lionel Trilling. Trilling was a strenuous thinker who was proud to think “too much.” As an intellectual he did not spare his own kind, and though he did not consider himself a rationalist, he was grounded in the world. This collection features 32 of Trilling’s essays on a range of topics, from Jane Austen to George Orwell and from the Kinsey Report to Lolita. Also included are Trilling’s seminal essays “Art and Neurosis” and “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.” Many of the pieces made their initial appearances in periodicals such as The Partisan Review and Commentary; most were later reprinted in essay collections. This new gathering of his writings demonstrates again Trilling’s patient, thorough style. Considering “the problems of life”―in art, literature, culture, and intellectual life―was, to him, a vital occupation, even if he did not expect to get anything as simple or encouraging as “answers.” The intellectual journey was the true goal. No matter the subject, Trilling’s arguments come together easily, as if constructing complicated defenses and attacks were singularly simple for his well-honed mind. The more he wrote on a subject and the more intricate his reasoning, the more clear that subject became; his elaboration is all function and no filler. Wrestling with Trilling’s challenging work still yields rewards today, his ideas speaking to issues that transcend decades and even centuries.
https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Obligation-Be-Intelligent-Selected/dp/0810124882?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0810124882
(Book by Trilling, Lionel)
Book by Trilling, Lionel
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-World-Jefferson-lecture-humanities/dp/0670003778?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0670003778
(Published in 1947, as the cold war was heating up, Lionel...)
Published in 1947, as the cold war was heating up, Lionel Trilling’s only novel was a prophetic reckoning with the bitter ideological disputes that were to come to a head in the McCarthy era. The Middle of the Journey revolves around a political turncoat and the anger his action awakens among a group of intellectuals summering in Connecticut. The story, however, is less concerned with the rights and wrongs of left and right than with an absence of integrity at the very heart of the debate. Certainly the hero, John Laskell, staging a slow recovery from the death of his lover and a near-fatal illness of his own, comes to suspect that the conflicts and commitments involved are little more than a distraction from the real responsibilities, and terrors, of the common world. A detailed, sometimes slyly humorous, picture of the manners and mores of the intelligentsia, as well as a work of surprising tenderness and ultimately tragic import, The Middle of the Journey is a novel of ideas whose quiet resonance has only grown with time. This is a deeply troubling examination of America by one of its greatest critics.
https://www.amazon.com/Middle-Journey-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590170156?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1590170156
(In 1947, Lionel Trilling, the prominent literary critic, ...)
In 1947, Lionel Trilling, the prominent literary critic, published a novel entitled The Middle of the Journey. While conducting research in the archives at Columbia University, Geraldine Murphy discovered a second novel-a clean, well-crafted "third" of a book that Trilling described as having "point, immediacy, warmth under control, drama, and even size." The Journey Abandoned was supposed to be a novel about the anomalies of heroic action in a conformist age. Instead, published here for the first time, it is a highly personal portrait of the life of letters in America. Jorris Buxton, the narrative's larger-than-life focus, is an elderly poet and novelist turned distinguished mathematical physicist. Modeled on the romantic poet Walter Savage Landor, Buxton is destined to embroil himself in a principled but somewhat absurd conflict, just as the aged Landor had, and through his folly complicate the lives of his admirers. These memorable characters include Garda Thorne, a beautiful short-story writer (and Buxton's former mistress); Harold Outram, the director of an influential private foundation and a compromised man of letters; Philip Dyas, the headmaster of a private school; the Hollowells, a wealthy, progressive couple; Marion Cathcart, a young woman of Outram's household; and Vincent Hammell, an untried literary man from the Midwest and Buxton's newly appointed biographer. Hammell is the central consciousness of the novel. A young man from the provinces, he is drawn from Trilling's own experience yet also indebted to the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, the literary form Trilling admired as a critic and emulated, in these pages, as a novelist. In her introduction, Murphy considers how The Journey Abandoned (which is her title) relates to the critical ideas Trilling articulated in his famous essay collection, The Liberal Imagination. She speculates that Henry James came to displace Landor as the model for Jorris Buxton, a development that may have both inspired and inhibited the writing of this novel.
https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Abandoned-Unfinished-Novel/dp/0231144504?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0231144504
(Five modern stories reveal the imagination and sensitivit...)
Five modern stories reveal the imagination and sensitivity of a preeminent literary critic toward the plight of the mentally ill and racial, religious, and economic minorities
https://www.amazon.com/Place-Other-Stories-LIONEL-TRILLING/dp/0156680629?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0156680629
(“The modern novel in its most cogent and permanent form”–...)
“The modern novel in its most cogent and permanent form”––this has been the achievement of E. M. Forster; his masterpiece, A Passage to India, belongs with perhaps three or four other works in English at the pinnacle of literary craftsmanship in this century. Yet for many years Forster’s genius was virtually unrecognized in America. Not until 1943, when Lionel Trilling’s authoritative and discerning study was first published, did Forster find his way to a broad American audience. In this 1964 revision of the first paperbook edition, Mr. Trilling added a preface and brought the bibliography up to date. His book performs two services: it is a critical-biographical introduction to the master novelist and his works; it is in itself a primary document in the development of, contemporary American criticism. Here is criticism functioning at its best, deftly, surely, wittily, within a framework of the ideas which are basic to literary thought today.
https://www.amazon.com/M-Forster-Guidebook-Directions-Paperback/dp/0811202100?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0811202100
(This essay was written as the Freud Anniversary Lecture o...)
This essay was written as the Freud Anniversary Lecture of 1955, the fifth of the annual lectures established by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society to mark the day of Freud's birth. It has been somewhat revised and expanded for publication.
https://www.amazon.com/Freud-Crisis-Culture-Lionel-Trilling/dp/B000BWROGK?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000BWROGK
(Writings on general cultural issues accompany discussions...)
Writings on general cultural issues accompany discussions of such authors as Edith Wharton, Robert Graves, C. P. Snow, and Charles Dickens
https://www.amazon.com/Gathering-Fugitives-works-Lionel-Trilling/dp/0151345821?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0151345821
Lionel Trilling was born on July 4, 1905 in Queens, New York He was the son of Fannie (née Cohen), who was from London, and David Trilling, a tailor from Bialystok in Poland. His family was Jewish.
In 1921, he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, and, at age sixteen, entered Columbia University, thus beginning a lifelong association with the university. He wrote for the Morningside literary journal. In 1925, he graduated from Columbia College, and, in 1926, earned a Master of Arts degree at the university (His master's essay was entitled Theodore Edward Hook: his life and work).
In 1932 he returned to Columbia to pursue his doctoral degree in English literature. He earned his doctorate in 1938 with a dissertation about Matthew Arnold that he later published.
He received honorary degrees from a number of institutions, including Brandeis, Harvard, and Yale.
He eventually was appointed as the first Jewish assistant professor of English at Columbia University in 1939, receiving full professorship in 1948. Trilling was part of a group of largely Jewish New York intellectuals who dominated American culture and letters in the 1940s and 1950s. He brought a nearly religious devotion to his study of literature and thought, and through his writings revived interest in many neglected authors and works. He was praised for his erudition, the elegance, clarity, and care of his prose, and his high moral thoughtfulness. He was particularly interested in the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, whose works he examined using the methods of modern psychology. His first published book, Matthew Arnold (1939), gave new insight into Arnold's character. The same critical methods were evident in E. M. Forster (1943), The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955), A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), Beyond Culture: Essays on Learning and Literature (1965), and Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). Trilling's books and his essays in various journals and reviews were highly influential in intellectual circles, with his most influential book being The Liberal Imagination, an attempt to complicate and redeem liberalism with the addition of the imagination, ethical stoicism, and new-found ironies. His work also includes several short stories and a novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), which introduced themes found in his criticism. He edited The Portable Matthew Arnold (1949) and The Selected Letters of John Keats (1951), and wrote Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955). He often returned to studies involving Freud, and later co-edited with Steven Marcus The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1961).
Trilling did not often deal with Jewish subjects in an overt manner, and many other Jewish American scholars of the period, including Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, believed that he was uncomfortable with his Jewish origins. However, early in his career, in the 1920s, Trilling wrote short stories focused on Jewish American identity for the humanist Menorah Journal, and he continued to write on Jewish writers and Jewish themes throughout his career. In "Wordsworth and the Rabbis" (1955), he explored what he saw as a common quality in Wordsworth's thought and Rabbinic Judaism: namely, devotion to a divine object – Nature for Wordsworth and Torah for the rabbis. In an essay on the Russian-Jewish writer Isaac *Babel (in the introduction to Babel's Collected Stories, 1961), he observed that Babel, the Jew who wrote about a Jew among the Cossacks, was painfully aware of the dialectic of Cossack and Jew, body and mind, society and self. He also served at Columbia as a supportive mentor to numerous important Jewish writers, including Allen Ginsberg, John Hollander, Steven Marcus, and Norman Podhoretz. Trilling's wife, the literary critic Diana (Rubin) Trilling (1905–1996), wrote Claremont Essays (1964) and edited works by D. H. Lawrence. She headed the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (1955–57).
He diedon November 5, 1975 (aged 70) in New York City.
(In his tradition, Lionel Trilling takes the reader into t...)
(The Broken Mirror : A collection of Writings from Contemp...)
(The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and in...)
(This essay was written as the Freud Anniversary Lecture o...)
(Published in 1947, as the cold war was heating up, Lionel...)
( Bringing together the thoughts of one of American liter...)
(Five modern stories reveal the imagination and sensitivit...)
(Content with her life and not interested in marriage, Emm...)
(An anthology of essays, criticism, and reviews, unpublish...)
("Now and then," writes Lionel Triling "it is possible to ...)
(In 1947, Lionel Trilling, the prominent literary critic, ...)
(Writings on general cultural issues accompany discussions...)
(“The modern novel in its most cogent and permanent form”–...)
(A newly translated collection of stories. His desire to r...)
(Book by Trilling, Lionel)
Trilling's politics have been strongly debated and, like much else in his thought, may be described as "complex. " An often-quoted summary of Trilling's politics is that he wished to:
"(remind) people who prided themselves on being liberals that liberalism was . .. a political position which affirmed the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity, and difficulty. "
Of ideologies, Trilling wrote, "Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties and of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding. "
Politically, Trilling was a noted member of the anti-Stalinist left, a position that he maintained to the end of his life.
In his earlier years, Trilling wrote for and in the liberal tradition, explicitly rejecting conservativism; from the preface to his The Liberal Imagination, 1950 (emphasis added to the much-quoted last line):
"In the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas. "
Some, both conservative and liberal, argue that Trilling's views became steadily more conservative over time, and Trilling has been embraced as sympathetic to neoconservativism by neoconservatives (such as Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary), though this embrace was unrequited, Trilling criticizing the New Left (as he had the Old Left), but not embracing neoconservativism. The extent to which Trilling may be identified with neoconservativism continues to be contentious, forming a point of debate.
Trilling has alternatively been characterized as solidly moderate, as evidenced by many statements, ranging from the very title of his novel, The Middle of the Journey, to a central passage from the novel:
"An absolute freedom from responsibility – that much of a child none of us can be. An absolute responsibility – that much of a divine or metaphysical essence none of us is. "
Along the same lines, in reply to a taunt by Richard Sennett, "You have no position; you are always in between, " Trilling replied, "Between is the only honest place to be. "
Quotations:
“We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us. ”
“The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive. ”
“Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty. ”
“In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. ”
“Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding. ”
“What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have. ”
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him. ”
“Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony. ”
“There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination. ”
“Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere. ”
“Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood. ”
“We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian. ”
“The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy. ”
“The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals. ”
“We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think. " But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time. ”
“The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. ”
He joined the Boar's Head Society.
Trilling was a senior fellow of the Kenyon School of English and subsequently a senior fellow of the Indiana School of Letters.
Trilling was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Lionel Trilling was a very popular teacher, noted for his sense of humor and wit.
In 1929 he married Diana Rubin, and the two began a lifelong literary partnership.
Professor of Literature and Criticism, Professor of Poetry