Lionel Trilling

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Lionel Trilling : biography

04 July 1905 – 05 November 1975

Critical and literary works

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 contemporary Whittaker Chambers

 ). 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. 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.”Trilling, Lionel, et al., The Situation in American Writing: A Symposium Partisan Review, Volume 6 5 (1939). 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 Homage to Catalonia.

In 2008, Columbia University Press published an unfinished novel that Trilling had abandoned in the late 1940s. Scholar Geraldine Murphy discovered the half-finished novel among Trilling’s papers archived at Columbia University. , 2008. Retrieved 2008-05-27. Trilling’s novel, The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel, is set in the 1930s and involves a young protagonist, Vincent Hammell, who seeks to write a biography of an elder 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, "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."

Politics

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:1974 foreword to The Liberal Imagination, quoted and cited as "often repeated" in

"[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."

Politically, Trilling was a noted member of the anti-Stalinist left, a position that he maintained to the end of his life.Writing in the 1974 foreword to his 1950 collection The Liberal Imagination, (shortly before his 1975 death) he wrote that the essays were "with reference to a particular political-cultural situation, … [namely] the commitment that a large segment of the intelligentsia of the West gave to the degraded version of Marxism known as Stalinism."

Liberal