SOURCE: “When Giants Walked the Land,” in Saturday Review, Vol. 4, No. 17, May 28, 1977, pp. 22-23.

In the following interview, Trilling discusses her disappointment in the intellectual community of the 1970s.

Since the recent death of her husband, Lionel, Diana Trilling has continued to live in the spacious, comfortable apartment just around the corner from Columbia University, where at one terrible time, as she recounts in We Must March My Darlings, she anxiously awaited an onslaught from neighboring Harlem that would never come. But as she freely admits, “I've never been in the business of prophecy,” and at the time of the event, the student take-over of Columbia in the spring of 1968, it seemed certain that the center could not hold, and that the world of liberal culture must be coming apart.

Mrs. Trilling's latest collection of essays We Must March My Darlings—ranging as they do from a panegyric...