ABSTRACT
Lionel Trilling (b. 1905) was born and educated in New York and has taught at Columbia University for most of his professional life. He is the author of two full-length critical studies, Matthew Arnold (New York, 1939), and E. M. Forster (Norfolk, Con., 1943). The choice of these subjects is perhaps revealing, for Trilling himself is a critic in the Arnoldian tradition of disinterested moral and intellectual inquiry, tempered by a Forsterian awareness of the ironies, pitfalls, and paradoxes in the position of the liberal humanist intellectual. Though, like most American critics of his generation, he was affected by the theory and practice of the New Criticism, the idea of the autonomy of the work of art was never congenial to him. On the contrary, he has always been inclined, by temperament and conviction, to emphasize the ways in which works of literature both affect and reflect the cultural contexts in which they are produced and consumed.
