{"product_id":"the-middle-of-the-journey-isbn-9781590170151","title":"The Middle of the Journey","description":"Published in 1947, as the cold war was heating up, Lionel Trilling’s only novel was a prophetic reckoning with the bitter ideological disputes that were to come to a head in the McCarthy era. \u003ci\u003eThe Middle of the Journey\u003c\/i\u003e revolves around a political turncoat and the anger his action awakens among a group of intellectuals summering in Connecticut. The story, however, is less concerned with the rights and wrongs of left and right than with an absence of integrity at the very heart of the debate. Certainly the hero, John Laskell, staging a slow recovery from the death of his lover and a near-fatal illness of his own, comes to suspect that the conflicts and commitments involved are little more than a distraction from the real responsibilities, and terrors, of the common world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA detailed, sometimes slyly humorous, picture of the manners and mores of the intelligentsia, as well as a work of surprising tenderness and ultimately tragic import, \u003ci\u003eThe Middle of the Journey\u003c\/i\u003e is a novel of ideas whose quiet resonance has only grown with time. This is a deeply troubling examination of America by one of its greatest critics.\"Trilling’s beautifully composed novel is set in the late 1930s, when the communist dream embraced by Slesinger’s characters was stripped bare by the emerging facts of Stalin’s atrocities…Just as Slesinger in her comic world unites politics and sex, so Trilling in his tragic one fuses politics with death.\" — Sam Tanenhaus, \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"…this moody document of a vanished intelligentsia anticipates the deepening crisis of the left in the McCarthy years.\" — \u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Lionel Trilling’s \u003ci\u003eThe Middle of the Journey\u003c\/i\u003e is a searching account of the liberal’s dilemma of conscience in a world surrendering to extremes of dogma, an important first novel by a distinguished critic….Mr. Trilling has sounded a new note of dissent, a more realistic and mature one than the frantic reformism of the thirties and the sterile disillusionment of the twenties.\" — \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic Monthly\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A depth that recalls Dostoyevsky and a subtlety worthy of Henry James.\" — \u003ci\u003eListener\u003c\/i\u003eLionel Trilling (1905-1975) was an American literary critic, author, and University Professor at Columbia University. Among the most influential of his many works are two collections of essays, \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eLiberal Imagination\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Opposing Self\u003c\/i\u003e; a critical study of E.M. Forster; and one novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Middle of the Journey\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMonroe Engel was for many years director of the creative writing program at Harvard University. His books include \u003ci\u003eFish \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eStatutes of Limitations\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301346922725,"sku":"NP9781590170151","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590170151.jpg?v=1767740498","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-middle-of-the-journey-isbn-9781590170151","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}