19 Facts About Lionel Trilling

Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher.

Lionel Trilling was one of the leading US critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature.

Lionel Mordecai Trilling was born in Queens, New York, the son of Fannie, who was from London, and David Trilling, a tailor from Bialystok in Poland.

Lionel Trilling joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote for the Morningside literary journal.

Lionel Trilling earned his doctorate in 1938 with a dissertation about Matthew Arnold that he later published.

Lionel Trilling was promoted to assistant professor the following year, becoming Columbia's first tenured Jewish professor in its English department.

Lionel Trilling became the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism in 1965.

Lionel Trilling was a popular instructor and for thirty years taught Columbia's Colloquium on Important Books, a course about the relationship between literature and cultural history, with Jacques Barzun.

Lionel Trilling's students included Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Donald M Friedman, Allen Ginsberg, Eugene Goodheart, Steven Marcus, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Cynthia Ozick, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, George Stade, David Lehman, Leon Wieseltier, Louis Menand, Robert Leonard Moore and Norman Podhoretz.

In 1937, Lionel Trilling joined the recently revived magazine Partisan Review, a Marxist, but anti-Stalinist, journal founded by William Philips and Philip Rahv in 1934.

Lionel Trilling wrote one novel, The Middle of the Journey, about an affluent Communist couple's encounter with a Communist defector.

Lionel Trilling wrote the introduction to The Selected Letters of John Keats, 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 Lionel Trilling had abandoned in the late 1940s.

Scholar Geraldine Murphy discovered the half-finished novel among Lionel Trilling's papers archived at Columbia University.

Politically, Lionel Trilling was a noted member of the anti-Stalinist left, a position that he maintained to the end of his life.

Some, both conservative and liberal, argue that Lionel Trilling's views became steadily more conservative over time.

Lionel Trilling has been embraced as sympathetic to neoconservativism by neoconservatives.

However, this embrace was unrequited; Lionel Trilling criticized the New Left but did not embrace neoconservativism.

Lionel Trilling has alternatively been characterized as solidly moderate, as evidenced by many statements, ranging from the very title of his novel, The Middle of the Journey, to a central passage from the novel:.