Trilling, Lionel

Related Category: American Literature: Biographies

1905–75, American critic, author, and teacher, b. New York City, grad. Columbia (B.A., 1925; M.A., 1926; Ph.D., 1938). He began teaching literature at Columbia in 1932 and became a full professor in 1948. His essays—collected as The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955, repr. 1979), A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), and Beyond Culture (1979)—combine social, psychological, and political insights with literary criticism and scholarship. Other works include a novel, Middle of the Journey (1947); Matthew Arnold (1939), a pioneering use of Freudian psychology in analyzing a public figure and his work; E. M. Forster (1943); The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1962); and Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). His wife, Diana Trilling (Diana Rubin Trilling), 1905–96, b. New York City, was a literary and cultural critic. Long a reviewer for the Nation magazine, she collected many of her pieces in Reviewing the Forties (1978). Her works also include We Must March My Darlings (1977), an essay collection; Mrs. Harris (1981), a study of and meditation on a murder trial; and The Beginning of the Journey (1993), a memoir of the Trillings and their marriage.

See the posthumous collection of his essays, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, ed. by L. Wieseltier (2000); studies by R. Boyers (1977), M. Krupnick (1986), D. T. O'Hara (1988), and J. Rodden, ed. (1999).