Historically famous critics

Lionel Trilling

1905-1975 · American · 20th century

Literary and cultural critic who examined the moral limits of American liberalism

Trilling stands among the essential American critics for insisting that literature carries moral weight and for probing the blind spots of the liberalism he otherwise shared. In The Liberal Imagination he argued that liberal thought too often reduced human complexity to politics and ignored the tragic and irrational dimensions of experience that great fiction records. His careful, self-questioning essays made cultural criticism a serious intellectual vocation and shaped a generation of readers.