A detailed, sometimes slyly humorous, picture of the manners and mores of the intelligentsia, as well as a work of surprising tenderness and ultimately tragic import, The Middle of the Journey is a novel of ideas whose quiet resonance has only grown with time. This is a deeply troubling examination of America by one of its greatest critics.
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.
"Trilling’s beautifully composed novel is set in the late 1930s,
when the communist dream embraced by Slesinger’s characters was
stripped bare by the emerging facts of Stalin’s atrocities…Just 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 Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey is a
searching account of the liberal’s 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
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