SOURCE: “Di and Li,” in New Yorker, Vol. 69, No. 29, September 13, 1993, pp. 90-99.

In the following interview, Trilling and Harris discuss Trilling's life and career.

It is the fate of notable literary figures to be relegated for safekeeping to a pathetically simple symbolic image in people's minds. However much we may know about the complexity of, say, Ernest Hemingway or H. L. Mencken or Virginia Woolf, there they are, filed away in our overcrowded mental archive like little cartoons: Hemingway in his safari outfit, Mencken in galluses and boater, Woolf in drooping woollens gazing raptly at a moth.

Despite many decades of eminence as a literary and cultural critic, Diana Trilling has eluded efforts to find a catchall image for her. She has managed to slip through the net of this nearly universal process in part because the public's gaze was usually focussed on her more famous husband, the...