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 belletristic publishing house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, follows on the same house's publication in 2000 of a volume of Trilling's selected essays entitled The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. Trilling's life and work richly deserve the honor of such attention, because he was, in the period from 1940 until his death in 1975, probably the outstanding living American literary critic and a fine prose stylist, and because his work remains intelligible and important while that of many of his brilliant peers has aged badly or remains of interest only to academic specialists.
A Jewish New Yorker born in 1905, Trilling was educated at Columbia University and spent most of his career teaching there — from 1932 until his death, though he also held visiting professorships at both Harvard and Oxford. His lifetime, 1905–1975, spanned some of the most destructive developments and events in all of human history, and fit the moniker coined by the Chicago Jewish writer Isaac Rosenfeld: “an age of enormity.” The Oxford Jewish philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) said of the 20th century that it was “the most terrible century in Western history,” and he had a point.
