The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society.

TRILLING, Lionel.

Item Number: 100944

New York: The Viking Press, 1950.

First edition of one of the influential works of criticism published in the twentieth century. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to Herbert and Elzie Wechsler, “To Elzie and Herbert most affectionately Lionel 21 March 1950.” The recipient Herbert Wechsler was a legal scholar and former director of the American Law Institute (ALI). He is most widely known for his constitutional law scholarship and for the creation of the Model Penal Code. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Wechsler as one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century. Fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Robert Hallock. A nice association.

The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. "Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote" (The New York Review of Books). Named by The National Review as one of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century.