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 bears, doubtless with fortitude, the most aggressively euphonious name of any writer since Edna St. Vincent Millay. He also, it seems to me, owns and operates one of the most ...

Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. When the feuding tramps in "Waiting for Godot" trade insults, Gogo ends the exchange with a slur so vicious it leaves ...

Although Lionel Trilling's third collection of essay is, in deed, a gathering of fugitive pieces with little collective raison d'etre except the profits which he and the Beacon Press will reap from ...

A new collection of the eminent public intellectual’s letters reveals a man for his time — and ours. The recent publication of Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, by our premier ...

Letters of Lionel Trilling (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 464 pp., $35.00. Lionel Trilling’s eminence was so great, however, that he reached near celebrity status as a literary critic.

Lionel Trilling’s 1950 book The Liberal Imagination was not a celebration of liberalism. It was an indictment of liberalism’s dependence on what we might call the social imagination—a method of ...

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 ...