The Liberal Imagination

The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950) is a collection of sixteen essays by American literary critic Lionel Trilling, published by Viking in 1950. The book was edited by Pascal Covici, who had worked with Trilling when he edited and introduced Viking's Portable Matthew Arnold in 1949. With the exception of the preface, which was written specifically for the publication of the book, all the essays included in The Liberal Imagination were individually published in the decade before the book's publication in literary and critical journals, such as The Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, and The American Quarterly. The essays represent Trilling's written work and critical thoughts of the 1940s.

In the essays, Trilling explores the theme of what he calls "liberalism" by looking closely at the relationship between literature, culture, mind, and the imagination. He offers passionate critiques against literary ideas of reality as material and physical, such as those he ascribes to V. L. Parrington, Theodore Dreiser, and the writers of the Kinsey Reports. He supports writers who engage in "moral realism" through an engaged imagination and a "power of love," which he sees expressed in works by Henry James, Mark Twain, Tacitus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Wordsworth—and in the ideas of human nature in the works of Sigmund Freud.

The Liberal Imagination enjoyed a relatively large commercial success, selling 100,000 hardcover and 70,000 paperback copies, and was later to be understood as an essential book for a group of influential literary, political, and cultural thinkers of the era, called “The New York Intellectuals." The initial reviewers, such as Irving Howe, R. P. Blackmore, Norman Podhoretz, and Delmore Schwartz, represent the importance of this book to the "Intellectuals." In later years, scholars turned to The Liberal Imagination as a work representative of the post-war politics and culture of the United States, which was entering the early stages of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Synopses

“Preface”

Trilling introduces the book, writing that though the essays that comprise the volume “are diverse in subject, they have…a certain unity.” The unity, he suggests, is an interest in liberalism. Trilling argues that because his contemporary America is predominantly tending to an intellectually liberal tradition, the lack of a robust conservative intellectual tradition causes the lack of a cultural dialectic, making liberal ideas also weak.