Lionel Trilling was one of twentieth-century America’s most famous intellectuals, a man whose name was well-known even outside the ivy-covered campuses where his writing was required reading. He was a walking paradox, both mortified by and grateful for his fame, a liberal contrarian who rejected the trendy modernist thinking of the time. It’s hard to imagine a work of literary criticism being greeted today with the interest that surrounded the publication of Trilling’s masterpiece The Liberal Imagination, a collection of sixteen essays that first appeared together in 1950. In The Liberal Imagination, republished today by New York Review Books Classics with an introduction by The New Yorker‘s Louis Menand, Trilling demonstrates his even-handedness in discussions of classics by Twain, Kipling, and Fitzgerald that come alongside dissections of the American culture at large. The book contains a deconstruction of the liberal mindset in which Trilling argues that only the human imagination, rather than pure science and rationality, can answer the pressing questions on society and culture. Those unfulfilled promises would find their solutions in creativity and expressive thought. It is, according to Trilling, for precisely this reason that literary criticism must tackle issues greater than anaphora, synecdoche, and pathetic fallacy. In his final essay, “The Meaning of a Literary Idea,” the great theorist explains that novels are “inescapably connected with our wills and desires,” pieces of an “active literature” that reveal more about who we are than wecan begin to realize.

KEYWORDS: books, criticism, Lionel Trilling

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