Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), American educator and influential literary critic. For most of his career Trilling taught at Columbia University. In his books Trilling used psychological and sociological methods to elucidate cultural values. One of his major concerns was the relationship between the self and society. Trilling's works include The Liberal Imagination (1950), considered perhaps his major contribution; Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955); The Opposing Self (1955); Beyond Culture (1965); and Mind in the Modern World and Sincerity and Authenticity (both 1972). Trilling also wrote studies of the English poet Matthew Arnold, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and the English novelist E. M. Forster. Trilling's one novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), discusses the intellectual climate of the 1930s and 1940s.