Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Adam Kirsch, seeking to restore Trilling to his rightful place in the literary and intellectual world, tells us ...

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), the regal American literary and social critic, was an ardent letter writer — he composed as many as 600 a year — but a slow-moving one. Corresponding with him was like ...

Without a well-developed conservatism to expose problems, liberalism would have to find its critics in literature. Getty Images/Drew Angerer A famous passage in the preface to Lionel Trilling’s book ...

Drawing from an unpublished, May 1968, interview with Trilling. The seventy-five-page interview with Lionel Trilling conducted in May 1968, which I recently discovered in the Oral History Research ...

One of the curiosities of literary study today is how thoroughly the titan-critics of the mid-20th century have disappeared. Does any literature graduate student feel he must read The Well-Wrought Urn ...

A RECENT CASUAL, DISMISSIVE reference to Lionel Trilling recalled to me the man who was the most eminent intellectual figure of his time–certainly in New York intellectual circles, but also beyond ...

The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, Michael Kimmage, Harvard University Press, 312 pages Whittaker Chambers created the passionate core of ...

The conventional wisdom about Lionel Trilling, Adam Kirsch writes in Why Trilling Matters, is that he was a “thwarted creator,” a writer who would rather have written novels than essays about them.

As part of the Personal Takes series, in which critics "write about the persistent hold" of certain literary figures on their imaginations, noted feminist literary critic Heilbrun (who also writes ...

In 1950, literary critic Lionel Trilling published a collection of essays called The Liberal Imagination. It contained a presciently devastating critique of modern American liberalism’s grasp of ...

It is indeed strange that Norman Birnbaum’s generally sensible essay fails to mention Lionel Trilling (“In Memoriam: Partisan Review,” The Review, May 9). At least 16 names associated with Partisan ...