Lionel Trilling (1905-74) taught at Columbia University from 1931 until his death and was the author of many books, including Matthew Arnold and a novel, The Middle of the Journey. Leon Wieseltier is literary editor of The New Republic.

With this re-publication of Lionel Trilling's finest essays, Leon Wieseltier offers readers of many generations, a rich overview of Trilling's achievement. The exhilarating essays collected here include justly celebrated masterpieces - on Mansfield Park and on "Why We Read Jane Austen"; on Twain, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Isaac Babel; on Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost; on "Art and Neurosis"; and the famous Preface to Trilling's book The Liberal Imagination.

"Wieseltier ... has chosen wisely ... One can recommend this book as either an introduction to or reminder of Lionel Trilling, one of the few intelligent men of our time toward whose work ... an intellectual obligation exists."--Richard Gilman, The New York Times Book Review

"Each essay makes points that are both fresh and timeless. The sheer muscle of the mind whose prose you are reading is evident in limber, seemingly effortless argument ... His interest in morality as expressed in literature is so deep and nuanced that reading him reminds one that to think about these matters is far more interesting, entertaining, and even exhilarating than it is improving."--Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Sunday Globe

"What Wieseltier's compendium now makes available is the mind of a serious traveller to the most exalted, and often the most problematical, stations of art and ideas and manners."--Cynthia Ozick, The New Yorker