About the Author

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was an American literary critic, author, and University Professor at Columbia University. Among the most influential of his many works are two collections of essays, The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self; a critical study of E.M. Forster; and one novel, The Middle of the Journey. Louis Menand is the Robert M. and Anne T. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Metaphysical Club-which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Francis Parkman Prize in 2002-and of American Studies, a collection of essays.

Reviews

This collection of essays, on subjects as diverse as Wordsworth's Immorality Ode and the Kinsey Report, is still wonderfully exciting, serious but never solemn, and of course, exquisitely written. Oldie