One of the curiosities of literary study today is how thoroughly the titan-critics of the mid-20th century have disappeared. Does any literature graduate student feel he must read The Well-Wrought Urn ...
Lionel Trilling bears, doubtless with fortitude, the most aggressively euphonious name of any writer since Edna St. Vincent Millay. He also, it seems to me, owns and operates one of the most ...
Letters of Lionel Trilling (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 464 pp., $35.00. Lionel Trilling’s eminence was so great, however, that he reached near celebrity status as a literary critic.