In Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), literary critic and poet Adam Kirsch presents us with a collection of 270 letters spanning the period from 1924 to 1975, the year of literary critic Lionel Trilling’s death at the age of 70. The letters are organized in chronological order rather than thematically, juxtaposing love letters to his wife Diana (an important literary critic in her own right) to discourses on his favorite British authors, to dealings with his psychoanalysts.
Trilling’s father was a tailor from Bialystok, Poland, and although Lionel’s mother was born in England and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, her family’s Jewish roots were also in Poland.
Lionel was born in Queens, N.Y., in 1905 and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He entered Columbia University at age 16 when, as Trilling wrote 50 years later, the university was “pretty far along toward its Jewish coloration.” He earned both his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia and made history when he overcame embedded academic anti-Semitism to become the first Jew to gain professorial tenure in Columbia’s prestigious English department.
Trilling’s father was a tailor from Bialystok, Poland, and although Lionel’s mother was born in England and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, her family’s Jewish roots were also in Poland.
Lionel was born in Queens, N.Y., in 1905 and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He entered Columbia University at age 16 when, as Trilling wrote 50 years later, the university was “pretty far along toward its Jewish coloration.” He earned both his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia and made history when he overcame embedded academic anti-Semitism to become the first Jew to gain professorial tenure in Columbia’s prestigious English department.
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