Sixteen discussions of the interplay between literature and society taught a generation of Americans to believe in the power of literature (for mischief as much as elevation). Trilling’s subjects ranged from Tacitus to Wordsworth, Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser and Henry James. The essays were not political, but they assumed an intimate connection between literature and politics. They also staked out, on “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet”, an adversarial position with respect to the liberalism that had hardened into Stalinism in the early years of the Cold War.

Trilling’s “first mature critical undertaking” had been his book entitled Matthew Arnold (1939), which he called a biography of Arnold’s mind. He had been drawn to Arnold, he said, for two reasons: a desire to understand Arnold’s melancholy (exemplified in Dover Beach) and a sense that, like Arnold, he was a liberal whose major effort in criticism was to call into question the substance of contemporary liberal thought. He felt himself to be, in Arnold’s words, “a Liberal, [but] a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and … above all, a believer in culture”. Arnold’s critique of Victorian liberalism deplored certain habits of mind, especially the herd instinct. Trilling, similarly, declared that “a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general righteousness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time”. Trilling also had a target: those American liberals who had been living contentedly as supporters of Stalinist totalitarianism.

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