Lionel Trilling
If Mark Van Doren was Columbia's most famous author, then Lionel
Trilling was certainly its most famous critic. One of the most
public of this century's public intellectuals, Trilling became nationally
known for both his scholarship and his literary criticism, which
appealed to a wide audience. At Columbia, however, Trilling was
also recognized as a gifted and dedicated teacher with a special
commitment to undergraduate education.
Such was Trilling's reputation that students of all kinds were
known to come to the College expressely to "take Trilling."
A native of Queens, he entered Columbia in 1921, when the College
was beginning to experiment with general education courses. When
he began teaching in the early 1930s, he was quickly recognized
as one of the school's most acute minds, though also something of
an iconoclast. He began teaching general education courses early
in his career-in the 1930s, he co-taught a section of the Colloquium
on Important Books with Jacques Barzun. Later he became a mainstay
of Humanities A.
Although Trilling wrote a well-received novel and short stories,
his national reputation was built on his many critical essays. A
regular contributor to the Partisan Review and other national journals
from the 1940s, he appealed both to the scholar and the general
reader. His best-known volume may be The Liberal Imagination
(1950), which seemed to capture the political outlook of an entire
era, but such later works as The Opposing Self (1955), Beyond
Culture (1965), and Sincerity and Authenticity (1972)
also made enduring contributions. Trilling's dispassionate commitment
to the life of the mind fell out of favor with some students in
the hectic days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but at the time
of his death in 1975, there was no mistaking his importance in the
life of Columbia College. "He was one of the people who created
the intellectual climate in which we moved," said his longtime
colleague Steven Marcus '48. "He made the intellectual weather
seem a part of nature rather than culture."
Return to Faculty
Profiles | Return to Core
History: An Oasis of Order
|
