The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling

The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling

Published in 1947, as the cold war was heating up, Lionel Trilling's only novel was a prophetic reckoning with the bitter ideological disputes that were to come to a head in the McCarthy era. The Middle of the Journey revolves around a political turncoat and the anger his action awakens among a group of intellectuals summering in Connecticut. The story, however, is less concerned with the rights and wrongs of left and right than with an absence of integrity at the very heart of the debate. Certainly the hero, John Laskell, staging a slow recovery from the death of his lover and a near-fatal illness of his own, comes to suspect that the conflicts and commitments involved are little more than a distraction from the real responsibilities, and terrors, of the common world.

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 (1905-74) was a professor at Columbia University from 1931 until his death, and he wrote a number of novels, including Matthew Arnold and The Middle of the Trip, a novel.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781590170151
ISBN 10	1590170156
Title	The Middle of the Journey
Author	Lionel Trilling
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2002-09-01
Number of pages	400
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.