The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling.

Following the publication of his monumental study of Matthew Arnold, in 1939, Lionel Trilling, then a professor at Columbia University, found himself much in demand as a literary critic. In the Arnoldian mold, he had many opinions about the connections between literature and society. In response to the demand, and to his own slowly matured ideas about the proper function of literary criticism, Trilling published a series of essays during the 1940’s, on a variety of subjects and for various occasions, all of them marked by the same serious concern with the role of social and political ideas in the shaping of works of literary imagination. Trilling thus worked out for himself a personal philosophy of criticism and, at the end of the decade, chose to publish sixteen of the essays, most of them revised and expanded, under the provocative title The Liberal Imagination. The collection, which appeared in 1950, bore the subtitle Essays on Literature and Society and included an explanatory preface which turned the volume into a manifesto, not only for Trilling personally but also, as it happened, for a generation of aspiring young writers of literary and cultural criticism.