Lionel Trilling

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Lionel Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. Trilling was a member of the group known as "The New York Intellectuals" and was a frequent contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he never established a new school of literary criticism, he is viewed as one of the great literary critics of the twentieth century for his ability to trace the cultural, social, and political implications of the literature of his time.

Academic Life

Trilling was born in the New York City borough of Queens to a Jewish family. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1921 and entered Columbia University at the age of sixteen, beginning an association with the university that lasted for the rest of his life. He graduated in 1925 and received his M.A. in 1926. After teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at Hunter College, Trilling returned to Columbia to teach literature in 1932. He received his Ph.D. in 1938 with a dissertation on Matthew Arnold, which he later published, and in 1939 was promoted to assistant professor, becoming the first Jewish professor to receive tenure in the Department of English. He became a full professor in 1948, and in 1965 was named the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism. He was a popular professor, and for 30 years he taught Columbia’s Colloquium on Important Books with Jacques Barzun, a well-regarded course on the relationship between literature and cultural history. His students included Norman Podhoretz, Allen Ginsberg, and John Hollander.

"The New York Intellectuals" and the Partisan Review

In 1937, Trilling joined the staff of the recently revived Partisan Review, a Marxist but anti-Stalinist journal founded in 1934 by William Philips and Philip Rahv. The magazine was closely associated with a group known as the New York Intellectuals, which included Trilling and his wife, Diana Trilling, as well as Alfred Kazin, Delmore Schwartz, William Phillips, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, F. W. Dupee, Paul Goodman, Lionel Abel. The group was later joined by Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Elizabeth Hardwick, Richard Chase, William Barrett, Daniel Bell, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Rosenfeld, Susan Sontag, Stephen Marcus, Norman Podhoretz, and Hilton Kramer. Emphasizing the historical and cultural influence on authors and literature, they distanced themselves from the New Critics and focused on the social and political ramifications of the literature they discussed. They were also concerned with the future of New York’s intellectual middle class. In his Preface to his 1965 collection of essays Beyond Culture, Trilling defends the group, saying, “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 which are susceptible to its influence.”

Critical and Literary Works

Although Trilling wrote one well-received novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), about an affluent Communist couple, and short stories including “The Other Margaret”, he devoted himself to essays and reviews in which he reflected on literature’s ability to challenge the morality and conventions of the culture. Critic David Daiches said of Trilling, “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 authors Matthew Arnold (1939) and E. 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.” His first collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination, was published in 1950, followed by the collections The 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), and Beyond Culture (1965), a collection of essays concerning modern literary and cultural attitudes toward selfhood. In Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), he explores the ideas of the moral self in post-Enlightenment Western civilization. He wrote the introduction to The Selected Letters of John Keats (1951), in which he defended Keats’s notion of Negative Capability, as well as the introduction, “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth”, to the 1952 reissue of George Orwell’s book, Homage to Catalonia.

In 2008, Columbia University Press published an unfinished novel that Trilling abandoned in the late 1940's. Scholar Geraldine Murphy discovered the half-finished novel among Trilling's papers archived at Columbia University. Trilling's novel, titled The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel, is set in the 1930's and involves a young protagonist, Vincent Hammell, who seeks to write a biography of an elder, towering figure poet - Jorris Buxton. Buxton's character is loosely based on the nineteenth century, romantic poet Walter Savage Landor. Writer and critic, Cynthia Ozick praised the novel's skillful narrative and complex characters, writing that 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."

Works by Trilling

Fiction

• The Middle of the Journey (1947)
• Of This Time, of That Place and Other Stories (1979)
• The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel (2008) (published posthumously, edited by Geraldine Murphy)

Books and Collections of Essays

• Matthew Arnold (1939)
• E. M. Forster (1943)
• The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950)
• The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (1955)
• Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955)
• A Gathering of Fugitives (1956)
• Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (1965)
• Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), a collection of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard in 1969
• Mind in the Modern World: The 1972 Thomas Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (1973)
• Preface to The Experience of Literature (1979)
• Preface to Isaac Babel's Collected Stories (Penguin ) edition
• The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75 (1979)
• Speaking of Literature and Society (1980)

Bibliography

• 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.
• Krupnick, Mark. Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1986. ISBN 978-0-81-010712-0
• Lask, Thomas. “Lionel Trilling, 70, Critic, Teacher and Writer, Dies”, The New York Times, July 5, 1975
• Leitch, Thomas M. Lionel Trilling: An Annotated Bibliography.
• Lionel Trilling, et al., The Situation in American Writing: A Symposium Partisan Review, Volume 6 5 (1939)
• Longstaff, S. A. “New York Intellectuals”, Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
• Trilling, Diana. The Beginning of the Journey.
• Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning.

External links

• Johns Hopkins Guide to Criticism
• Quotations by Lionel Trilling
• Columbia Univ. profile of Trilling
• The Trilling Imagination by Gertrude Himmelfarb
• Article on The Middle of the Journey

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