The Middle Of The Journey

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

The great critic Lionel Trilling's novel was published in 1947, just as the Cold War was heating up. Trilling's only novel reveals a prophetic insight into the ideological conflicts that were to emerge in the McCarthy era, but The Middle of the Journey is also a work of passion and tragedy, a richly detailed and slyly humorous picture of the American intelligentsia.

Reviews

"Trillings beautifully composed novel is set in the late 1930s, when the communist dream embraced by Slesingers characters was stripped bare by the emerging facts of Stalins atrocitiesJust as Slesinger in her comic world unites politics and sex, so Trilling in his tragic one fuses politics with death." Sam Tanenhaus,The Boston Globe

"this moody document of a vanished intelligentsia anticipates the deepening crisis of the left in the McCarthy years."Publishers Weekly

"Lionel TrillingsThe Middle of the Journeyis a searching account of the liberals dilemma of conscience in a world surrendering to extremes of dogma, an important first novel by a distinguished critic.Mr. Trilling has sounded a new note of dissent, a more realistic and mature one than the frantic reformism of the thirties and the sterile disillusionment of the twenties."The Atlantic Monthly

"A depth that recalls Dostoyevsky and a subtlety worthy of Henry James."Listener

Author Bio

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was born in New York, educated at Columbia, where he rose in the ranks until becoming a University Professor in 1970. He published several books including Matthew Arnold, E. M. Forster, The Liberal Imagination, The Opposing Self, Beyond Culture, and Mind in the Modern World. He also contributed stories and essays to The Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, and other journals.