SOURCE: “Home Truths for the Intelligentsia,” in Times Literary Supplement, February 24, 1978, p. 239.

In the following review, Watson examines Trilling's portrayal of the American intelligentsia in We Must March My Darlings.

“You see” Lionel Trilling is said to have once remarked with justified pride to a colleague, “I have power”—a remark that was no exaggeration. His widow has now collected her polemical essays on the 1960s in We Must March My Darlings, and proves herself a powerful personality in her own right, and one who knows from experience what the power of a critic can be. “Men quarrel about opinion here”, she remarks, quoting James Fenimore Cooper on the United States, “because opinion rules. It is but one mode of struggling for power.” In the open societies of the West, opinion rules, and there are heady moments when a critic can form it.

Mrs. Trilling brings her polemic...