The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent

Selected Essays

Lionel Trilling

The America of John Dos Passos -- Hemingway and his critics -- T.S. Eliot's politics -- The immortality ode -- Kipling -- Reality in America -- Art and neurosis -- Manners, morals, and the novel -- The Kinsey report -- Huckleberry Finn -- The Princess Casamassima -- Wordsworth and the Rabbis -- William Dean Howells and the roots of modern taste -- The poet as hero: Keats in his letters -- George Orwell and the politics of truth -- The situation of the American intellectual at the present time -- Mansfield Park -- Isaac Babel -- The morality of inertia -- "That smile of Parmenides made me think"--The last lover -- A speech on Robert Frost: a cultural episode -- On the teaching of modern literature -- The Leavis-Snow controversy -- The fate of pleasure -- James Joyce in his letters -- Mind in the modern world -- Art, will, and necessity -- Why we read Jane Austen.