The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent; Selected Essays of Lionel Trilling

by Lionel Trilling; Edited and with an Introduction by Leon Wieseltier

• ISBN13: 9780374527990
• ISBN10: 0374527997
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2001-10-17
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

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 - onMansfield Parkand 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 bookThe Liberal Imagination.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Leon Wieseltier
The America of John Dos Passos	3	(8)
Hemingway and His Critics	11	(10)
T. S. Eliot's Politics	21	(12)
The Immortality Ode	33	(29)
Kipling	62	(9)
Reality in America	71	(16)
Art and Neurosis	87	(18)
Manners, Morals, and the Novel	105	(15)
The Kinsey Report	120	(17)
Huckleberry Finn	137	(12)
The Princess Casamassima	149	(29)
Wordsworth and the Rabbis	178	(25)
William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste	203	(21)
The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters	224	(35)
George Orwell and the Politics of Truth	259	(16)
The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time	275	(17)
Mansfield Park	292	(19)
Isaac Babel	311	(20)
The Morality of Inertia	331	(9)
``That Smile of Parmenides Made Me Think''	340	(14)
The Last Lover	354	(18)
The Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode	372	(9)
On the Teaching of Modern Literature	381	(21)
The Leavis-Snow Controversy	402	(25)
The Fate of Pleasure	427	(23)
James Joyce in His Letters	450	(27)
Mind in the Modern World	477	(24)
Art, Will, and Necessity	501	(16)
Why We Read Jane Austen	517	(40)
Appendixes
Under Forty	539	(4)
Preface to The Liberal Imagination	543	(6)
Preface to Beyond Culture	549	(8)
Bibliographical Notes	557	(4)
Index	561