The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism.

Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

萊昂內爾·特裏林（Lionel Trilling，1905—1975），齣生於美國紐約，就讀於哥倫比亞大學，於1932年迴校任教，在他長期的和非常傑齣的職業生涯中作為一個文學評論傢，他在校教英語係。他繼承阿諾徳、利維斯以來的批評傳統，側重從社會曆史、道德心理的角度評論文學和文化，被稱為20世紀中期美國年青一代的思想導師，對當代批評影響甚大。在他的許多作品中，最有影響力的三本散文集：《自由想象》，《反對自我》，《超越文化》；講座集《誠與真》。萊昂內爾·特裏林與作傢、評論傢戴安娜·特裏林結婚。