The career and reputation of Lionel Trilling as a literary critic pose something of an anomaly. Not, we should hasten to add, that Mr. Trilling does not deserve all the encomiums that have been lavished on him or the considerable influence he enjoys as a spiritual guide and mentor. But Mr. Trilling is by no means the kind of critic who has dominated the American literary scene since the end of the Second World War. His concern with literature has always been broadly moral and historical—like that of his master Matthew Arnold—rather than more strictly aesthetic or formal—like the group of New Critics who sprang into prominence exactly at the time Mr. Trilling's own star was on the rise. The anomaly posed by his career is that of explaining his reputation, when the whole drift of American literary opinion seemed to be moving in the...