Author. He received recognition as an American 20th century author, as well as a leading literary critic, scholar, and professor. Born into a Jewish family, his parents were immigrants, his mother from England and his father from Poland, who settled in New York City. On June 12, 1929, he married Diana Rubin, an author and columnist. His wife left her position as an assistant writer for NBC upon their marriage to become a "stay-at-home" wife. A decade later, his wife accepted a position at "The Nation," publishing, at his request, under her surname of Trilling. After their only child, James, was born in 1947, his wife became a freelance writer. There was professional competition between the couple in the success of their writings. Attending Columbia University in New York City, he received his M. A. in 1926 and PhD in 1938, after presenting his dissertation on author Matthew Arnold, which he published in 1939. He taught at the University of Wisconsin and Hunter College in New York City before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 1931, teaching Humanities A and remaining there the rest of his life. In the early days, he admitted there was resistance to him coming back to his alma mater as he was Jewish. He became Columbia University's first tenured Jewish professor in its English department, a full professor in 1948 and was named the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism in 1965. As an author, he was best-known for his numerous essays, being published in the "Partisan Review" and other national non-academic journals from the 1940s. His collection of essays, "The Experience of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries" was published in 1967. He wrote prefaces, afterwords, and commentaries for other authors' work. He critiqued for book clubs such works as Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Nabokov's "Lolita," Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March," Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet," the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, and nonfiction works like David Riesman's "The Lonely Crowd," Erwin Panofsky's art criticism, and Erik Erikson's "Young Man Luther." He had much psychological, sociological, and philosophical methods and insight in his work. His politics were complicated. As a liberal associated with the group of colleagues, the New York Intellectuals, he wrote the political novel "The Middle of the Journey" in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War and Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt for Communists in the United States. After the killing of thousands during the Great Purge of Joseph Stalin in the USSR, the couple became staunch anti-Communist, which went against their liberal colleagues' thinking. His best-known work was his 1950 "The Liberal Imagination," which seemed to capture the political outlook of an entire era, but faded in the next two decades. His later works included "The Opposing Self" in 1955, "Beyond Culture" in 1965, and "Sincerity and Authenticity" in 1972. During his career, he received numerous honors and awards including the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1969 and giving the first Jefferson Lecture in Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1972. His last publication was "Speaking of Literature and Society" in 1980. Among his archived papers at Columbia University, an unfinished manuscript was found and published in 2008 as "The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel," which was one of his three novels.