How I sat out the Vietnam War in an English department in Manchester, England, only to come home to another battle in New York
The writer and teacher talks about her wordsmith father, Clifton Fadiman, the middlebrow culture of his radio show ‘Information Please,’ and why being an assimilated Jew is not equivalent to having no legs
Lionel Trilling saw Isaac Babel as he imagined or wanted Eastern European Jews to be, not as he really was
‘The Age of the Crisis of Man’ traces the fall and rise of individualist pragmatism in America
The great M.H. Abrams, peer of Trilling, teacher of Bloom, and editor of the Norton Anthology, dead at 102
Inertia is its own moral choice, the great critic argued, a point to remember when facing the crisis in Syria
Racially charged remarks got the disgraced politician in trouble last week. But he’ll survive, because he’s sincere, even with his foot in his mouth.
The newly published second volume of the great critic’s journals reveals her transformation from hedonistic revolutionary to elitist enforcer
The writer Delmore Schwartz is largely forgotten today, but he once captured the anxieties and hopes of the Jewish intellectuals of the 1930s and stunned his generation with his poems and short stories
Lost Books
Alfred Kazin’s journals were more than just repositories for literary reflections; they were the laboratories in which he fashioned the writer—and Jew—he aspired to be
An archive of the best books lost in the stacks
We are all Rashi’s heirs, but what, exactly, is our inheritance?
Whittaker Chambers, Lionel Trilling and the anti-Communist turn
With Lionel Trilling and Robert Giroux cheerleading, Sam Astrachan had a stellar future. Then the glimmer faded.
Lionel Trilling was a classicist who did not believe in creativity’s lower depths. So what did he see in Isaac Babel?