New Releases by Lionel Trilling

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A great literary critic's quarrels with himself and others, revealed through his personal correspondence: "A joy to read." — Library Journal (starred review) In the mid-twentieth century, Lionel Trilling was America's most respected literary critic. His powerful and subtle essays inspired readers to think about how literature shapes our politics, our culture, and our selves. His 1950 collection, The Liberal Imagination, sold more than 170,000 copies, epitomizing a time that has been called the age of criticism. To his New York intellectual peers, Trilling could seem reserved and circumspect. But in his selected letters, Trilling is revealed in all his complexity. We witness his ardent courtship of Diana Trilling, who would become an eminent intellectual in her own right; his alternately affectionate and contentious rapport with former students such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Podhoretz; the complicated politics of Partisan Review and other fabled magazines of the period; and Trilling's relationships with other leading writers of the period, including Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson, and Norman Mailer. In Life in Culture, edited by Adam Kirsch, Trilling's letters add up to an intimate portrait of a great critic, and of America's intellectual journey from the political passions of the 1930s to the cultural conflicts of the 1960s and beyond. "It's a measure of Trilling's brilliance and humanity that these letters are as alive now as then were then." — Library Journal (starred review) "Captivating." — The Wall Street Journal

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.

This unfinished work was unearthed among his papers by City College professor Murphy, along with Trilling's own preface and commentary on the work as it stands: 24 short chapters. The novel is based on the late-life of poet Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), who got into some unpleasant business surrounding his Bath landlady and her 16-year-old ward. Trilling details the true-life incident in his preface, then moves his own story to 1930s New England.

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.

A collection of 45 columns and essays by the three eminent writers, originally written for the bulletin of the Readers' Subscription Book Club.

Collects essays on Twain, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Keats, Wordsworth, Frost, and "Mansfield Park," and includes the preface to the author's "The Liberal Imagination."

The fifty-two critical commentaries Trilling wrote to accompany each selection in his text book anthology, The Experience of Literature. This book is a wonderful journey through literary history, from the Greek dramatists to present day. Foreword by William Jovanovich. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Trilling is concerned with 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.

A concise critical study of Forster's personality, short stories, and novels.