Lionel Trilling
Born	Lionel Mordechai Trilling (1905-07-04)July 4, 1905 New York City, US
Died	November 5, 1975(1975-11-05) (aged 70) New York City, US
Alma mater	Columbia University
Occupation(s)	Literary critic,professor
Years active	1931–1975
Employer	Columbia University
Known for	Literary criticism
Notable work	The Liberal Imagination (1950)
Spouse	Diana Trilling ​ (m. 1929)​
Children	James Trilling
Relatives	Billy Cross (nephew)
Website	Official website

Lionel Mordecai Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an Americanliterary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. One of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century,^[1] he analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. He and his wife,Diana Trilling (née Rubin), were members of theNew York Intellectuals and contributors to thePartisan Review.

Lionel Mordecai Trilling was born inQueens, New York, the son of Fannie (née Cohen), who was from London, and David Trilling, a tailor fromBialystok in Poland.^[2] His family wasJewish. In 1921, he graduated fromDeWitt Clinton High School, and, at age 16, enteredColumbia University, beginning a lifelong association with the university. He joined theBoar's Head Society and wrote for theMorningside literary journal.^[3] In 1925, he graduated from Columbia College, and in 1926 he earned a master's degree at the university (his master's essay was titledTheodore Edward Hook: his life and work). He then taught at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison and atHunter College.

In 1929, he married Diana Rubin, and the two began a lifelong literary partnership. In 1932, he returned to Columbia to pursue his doctoral degree in English literature and to teach literature. He earned his doctorate in 1938 with a dissertation aboutMatthew Arnold that he later published. He was promoted to assistant professor the next year, becoming Columbia's first tenured Jewish professor in its English department.^[4] He was promoted to full professor in 1948.

Trilling became the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism in 1965. He was a popular instructor and for 30 years taught Columbia's Colloquium on Important Books, a course about the relationship between literature and cultural history, withJacques Barzun. His students includedLucien Carr,Jack Kerouac,Donald M. Friedman,^[5]Allen Ginsberg,Eugene Goodheart,Steven Marcus,John Hollander,Richard Howard,Cynthia Ozick,Carolyn Gold Heilbrun,George Stade,David Lehman,Leon Wieseltier,Louis Menand, Robert Leonard Moore,^[6] andNorman Podhoretz.

Trilling was the George Eastman Visiting Professor at theUniversity of Oxford from 1963 to 1965 and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry atHarvard University for academic year 1969–70. In 1972, theNational Endowment for the Humanities selected him to deliver the firstJefferson Lecture in the Humanities, described as "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."^[7] Trilling was a senior Fellow of the Kenyon School of English and subsequently a senior Fellow of theIndiana School of Letters. He held honorary degrees fromTrinity College,Harvard University, andCase Western Reserve University and memberships in theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters. He also served on the boards ofThe Kenyon Review andPartisan Review.^[8]

Trilling, a longtime heavy smoker, died of pancreatic cancer in 1975.^[8] He was survived by his wife and son, James Trilling, an art historian who served as a curator at theGeorge Washington University Museum and Textile Museum.^[9] His nephewBilly Cross is a musician residing in Denmark.^[10]

In 1937, Trilling joined the recently revived magazinePartisan Review, aMarxist but anti-Stalinist journal founded byWilliam Philips andPhilip Rahv in 1934.^[11]

ThePartisan Review was associated with the New York Intellectuals—Trilling,Diana Trilling,Lionel Abel,Hannah Arendt,William Barrett,Daniel Bell,Saul Bellow,Richard Thomas Chase,F. W. Dupee,Leslie Fiedler,Paul Goodman,Clement Greenberg,Elizabeth Hardwick,Irving Howe,Alfred Kazin,Hilton Kramer,Steven Marcus,Mary McCarthy,Dwight Macdonald, William Phillips,Norman Podhoretz,Harold Rosenberg,Isaac Rosenfeld,Delmore Schwartz, andSusan Sontag—who emphasized the influence of history and culture on authors and literature. The New York Intellectuals distanced themselves from theNew Critics.

In his preface to the essay collectionBeyond Culture (1965), Trilling defended the New York Intellectuals: "As a group, it is busy and vivacious about ideas, and, even more, about attitudes. Its assiduity constitutes an authority. The structure of our society is such that a class of this kind is bound by organic filaments to groups less culturally fluent that are susceptible to its influence."

Trilling wrote one novel,The Middle of the Journey (1947), about an affluent Communist couple's encounter with a Communist defector. (Trilling later acknowledged that the character was inspired by his Columbia College compatriot and contemporaryWhittaker Chambers.^[12][13]) His short stories include "The Other Margaret". Otherwise, he wrote essays and reviews in which he reflected on literature's ability to challenge the morality and conventions of the culture. CriticDavid Daiches wrote, "Mr. Trilling likes to move out and consider the implications, the relevance for culture, for civilization, for the thinking man today, of each particular literary phenomenon which he contemplates, and this expansion of the context gives him both his moments of his greatest perceptions, and his moments of disconcerting generalization."

Trilling published two complex studies of authorsMatthew Arnold (1939) andE. M. Forster (1943), both written in response to a concern with "the tradition of humanistic thought and the intellectual middle class which believes it continues this tradition."^[14] His first collection of essays,The Liberal Imagination, was published in 1950, followed by the collectionsThe Opposing Self (1955), focusing on the conflict between self-definition and the influence of culture,Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955),A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), andBeyond Culture (1965), a collection of essays on modern literary and cultural attitudes toward selfhood. InSincerity and Authenticity (1972), he explores the ideas of the moral self in post-Enlightenment Western civilization. He wrote the introduction toThe Selected Letters of John Keats (1951), in which he defendedKeats's notion ofnegative capability, as well as the introduction, "George Orwell and the Politics of Truth," to the 1952 reissue of Orwell'sHomage to Catalonia.

In 2008,Columbia University Press published an unfinished novel Trilling abandoned in the late 1940s. Scholar Geraldine Murphy discovered it among Trilling's papers archived atColumbia University.^[15]The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel is set in the 1930s and has a young protagonist, Vincent Hammell, who seeks to write a biography of an older poet, Jorris Buxton. Buxton's character is loosely based on the 19th-centuryRomantic poetWalter Savage Landor.^[15] Writer and criticCynthia Ozick praised the novel's "skillful narrative" and "complex characters", writing, "The Journey Abandoned is a crowded gallery of carefully delineated portraits whose innerness is divulged partly through dialogue but far more extensively in passages of cannily analyzed insight."^[16]

Trilling's politics have been strongly debated and, like much else in his thought, may be described as "complex." An oft-quoted summary of Trilling's politics is that he wished to:^[17]

[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.

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."^[18]

Politically, Trilling was a noted member of theanti-Stalinist left, a position he maintained to the end of his life.^[19][20]

In his earlier years, Trilling wrote for and in the liberal tradition, explicitly rejecting conservatism; from the preface to his 1950 essayThe Liberal Imagination (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 inirritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Some, both conservative and liberal, argue that Trilling's views became steadily more conservative over time. Trilling has been embraced as sympathetic toneoconservatism byneoconservatives (such asNorman Podhoretz, the former editor ofCommentary). But this embrace was unrequited; Trilling criticized theNew Left (as he had theOld Left) but did not embrace neoconservativism.

Diana Trilling claimed that neoconservatives were mistaken in thinking that Trilling shared their views. "I am of the firmest belief that he would never have become a neoconservative", she wrote in her memoir of their marriage, "The Beginning of the Journey", adding, "nothing in his thought supports the sectarianism of the neoconservative."^[21]

The extent to which Trilling may be identified with neoconservativism continues to be debated.^{[22][page needed]}

Trilling has alternatively been characterized as solidly moderate, as evidenced by many statements, ranging from the title of his novel,The Middle of the Journey, to a central passage from the novel:^[23]

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 byRichard Sennett, "You have no position; you are always in between," Trilling replied, "Between is the only honest place to be."^{[24][page needed]}

Fiction

• The Middle of the Journey. New York: Viking Press. 1947.LCCN 47031472.
• Of This Time, of That Place and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1979.ISBN 015168054X. (Selected by Diana Trilling and published posthumously.)
• Geraldine Murphy, ed. (2008).The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel. New York: Columbia University Press.ISBN 9780231144506. (Published posthumously)

Nonfiction and essays

• Matthew Arnold. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1939.LCCN 39027057. (Based on Trilling's Ph.D. thesis.)
• E.M. Forster. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions Books. 1943.LCCN 43011336.
• The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking Press. 1950.LCCN 50006914.
• The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking Press. 1955.LCCN 55005871.
• Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. Boston: Beacon Press. 1955.LCCN 55011594.
• Gathering of Fugitives. Boston: Beacon Press. 1956.
• Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning. New York: Viking Press. 1965.LCCN 65024276.
• Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1972.ISBN 0674808606. (A collection of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given atHarvard in 1970.)
• Mind in the Modern World: The 1972 Thomas Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. New York: Viking Press. 1973.ISBN 0670003778.
• Diana Trilling, ed. (1979).The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965–75. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.ISBN 015148421X. (Published posthumously)
• Diana Trilling, ed. (1980).Speaking of Literature and Society. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.ISBN 015184710X. (Published posthumously.)
• Leon Wieseltier, ed. (2000).The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.ISBN 0374257949. (Published posthumously.)
• Arthur Krystal, ed. (2001).A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from The Readers' Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs. New York: Free Press.ISBN 0743202627.
• Adam Kirsch, ed. (2018).Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.ISBN 9780374185152. (Published posthumously.)

Prefaces, afterwords, and commentaries

• Introduction toThe Portable Matthew Arnold. New York: Viking Press. 1949.LCCN 49009982.
• Introduction toSelected Letters of John Keats. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young. 1951.
• Introduction to'Collected Stories of Isaac Babel. New York: Criterion Books. 1955.
• Introduction toAusten, Jane (1957).Emma. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. (Riverside edition ofJane Austen's 1815 novel)
• Introduction toPawel Mayewski, ed. (1958).The Broken Mirror: A Collection of Writings from Contemporary Poland. New York: Random House.LCCN 58010948.
• Introduction toJones, Ernest (1961).The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. New York: Basic Books.ISBN 9780465097005.LCCN 61-1950.{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
• Afterword toSlesinger, Tess (1966).The Unpossessed. New York: Avon Books. (Reprint ofTess Slesinger's 1934 novel.)
• Preface and commentaries toThe Experience of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries^[25]
• Introduction toTrilling, Lionel (1970).Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reader. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.ISBN 0030795656.
• Introduction to James, Henry, The Princess Casamassima. New York, The Macmillan Company. 1948

• Alexander, Edward.Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe: And Other Stories of Literary Friendship. Transaction, 2009.ISBN 978-1-4128-1014-2.^[26]
• Ariano, Raffaele.Filosofia dell'individuo e romanzo moderno. Lionel Trilling tra critica letteraria e storia delle idee, Edizioni Storia e letteratura, 2019.
• Bloom, Alexander.Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World, Oxford University Press, 1986.ISBN 978-0-19-505177-3
• Chace, William M. “Lionel Trilling”,Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
• Kimmage, Michael.The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism. Harvard University Press, 2009.ISBN 978-0-674-03258-3.^[26]
• Kirsch, Adam.Why Trilling Matters. Yale University Press, 2011.ISBN 978-0-300-15269-2.
• Krupnick, Mark.Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1986.ISBN 978-0-8101-0712-0
• Lask, Thomas. “Lionel Trilling, 70, Critic, Teacher and Writer, Dies”,The New York Times, November 5, 1975
• Leitch, Thomas M.Lionel Trilling: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1992
• Longstaff, S. A. “New York Intellectuals”,Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
• O'Hara, Daniel T.Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation. U. of Wisconsin P, 1988.
• Shoben, Edward Joseph Jr.Lionel Trilling Mind and Character, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981,ISBN 0-8044-2815-8
• Trilling, Diana.The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling. Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1993.ISBN 0-15-111685-7.
• Trilling, Lionel.Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning.
• Trilling, Lionel et al.,The Situation in American Writing: A Symposium Partisan Review, Volume 6 5 (1939)
• Wald, Alan M. (1987).The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. University of North Carolina Press.ISBN 0-8078-4169-2.

• Glick, Nathan (July 2000),"The Last Great Critic",The Atlantic Monthly
• Leitch, Thomas, "Lionel Trilling: An Annotated Bibliography",New York: Garland, 1992
• Menand, Louis (September 29, 2008),"Regrets Only: Lionel Trilling and his discontents.",The New Yorker
• Ozick, Cynthia, "Lionel Trilling and the Buried Life",The Din in the Head

Wikiquote has quotations related toLionel Trilling.

• Columbia University – Profile of Trilling
• Columbia University – Lionel Trilling Papers (1899–1987)
• Article onThe Middle of the Journey
• Lionel Trilling at Columbia by Quentin Anderson
• Lionel Trilling atFind a Grave

• 1905 births
• 1975 deaths
• Writers from Queens, New York
• American literary critics
• American academics of English literature
• American people of Polish-Jewish descent
• Burials at Ferncliff Cemetery
• University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
• Harvard University faculty
• Hunter College faculty
• Columbia College, Columbia University alumni
• Columbia University faculty
• Jewish American academics
• Analysands of Rudolph Lowenstein
• 20th-century American novelists
• American male novelists
• DeWitt Clinton High School alumni
• Novelists from Massachusetts
• Novelists from New York (state)
• Novelists from Wisconsin
• 20th-century American non-fiction writers
• American male non-fiction writers
• Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
• 20th-century American male writers
• 20th-century American Jews
• Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

• Webarchive template wayback links
• CS1 errors: ISBN date
• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Use mdy dates from September 2012
• Official website not in Wikidata
• Articles with hCards
• Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from October 2023