
Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning
Lionel Trilling
In the mid-twentieth century, Lionel Trilling was America's most respected literary critic. His powerful and subtle essays inspired readers to think about how literature shapes our politics, our culture, and our selves. His 1950 collection, The Liberal Imagination, sold more than 100,000 copies, epitomizing a time that has been called the age of criticism. To his New York intellectual peers, Trilling could seem reserved and circumspect. But in his selected letters, Trilling is revealed in all his variousness and complexity. We witness his ardent courtship of Diana Trilling, who would become an eminent intellectual in her own right; his alternately affectionate and contentious rapport with former students such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Podhoretz; the complicated politics of Partisan Review and other fabled magazines of the period; and Trilling's relationships with other leading writers of the period, including Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson, and Norman Mailer. In Life in Culture, edited by Adam Kirsch, Trilling's letters add up to an intimate portrait of a great critic, and of America's intellectual journey from the political passions of the 1930s to the cultural conflicts of the 1960s and beyond.
Buy this book at Amazon- Publisher
- Picador
- Year
- 2019
- ISBN-13
- 9781250234704
- Genre
- Biography & Memoir
- Topics
- Literary criticismCorrespondence and intellectual life20th-century American intellectual history
Awards
- National Book Award for NonfictionShortlistedMajor(1966)
Other awarded books from Lionel Trilling
- Sincerity and Authenticity
If you liked Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, you could also like these

New York Jew
Alfred Kazin
0 wins · 8 score

Walter Lippmann and the American Century
Ronald Steel
3 wins · 36 score

Walter Lipmann and the American Century
Ronald Steel
1 win · 8 score

Anti-intellectualism in American Life
Richard Hofstadter
1 win · 16 score

Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in His Laboratory
Patrick Wilcken
0 wins · 2 score

United States: Essays 1952–1992
Gore Vidal
1 win · 12 score

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Janet Malcolm
1 win · 5 score

Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography
David S. Reynolds
1 win · 8 score

Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
Michael Scammell
1 win · 8 score

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
Christopher Lasch
1 win · 12 score

And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History 1918–1978
Malcolm Cowley
1 win · 12 score

Fame and Folly
Cynthia Ozick
0 wins · 4 score

Against Interpretation and Other Essays
Susan Sontag
0 wins · 4 score

George F. Kennan: An American Life
John Lewis Gaddis
1 win · 12 score

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
John Lahr
0 wins · 6 score
Similar Topics

Samuel Johnson
W. Jackson Bate
3 wins · 40 score
Literary criticism
Selected Essays
William Troy
1 win · 12 score
Literary criticism
United States: Essays 1952–1992
Gore Vidal
1 win · 12 score
Literary criticism
New York Jew
Alfred Kazin
0 wins · 8 score
20th-century American intellectual history
The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
1 win · 5 score
Literary criticism
Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars
Paul Fussell
0 wins · 4 score
Literary criticism
Fact and Symbol: Essays in the Sociology of Art and Literature
César Graña
0 wins · 4 score
Literary criticism
Fame and Folly
Cynthia Ozick
0 wins · 4 score
Literary criticism
Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus
Theodore Ziolkowski
0 wins · 4 score
Literary criticism
Forewords and Afterwords
W. H. Auden
0 wins · 4 score
Literary criticism
Bound to Please
Michael Dirda
0 wins · 3 score
Literary criticism