Author. She was an American writer, who became famous for her 1981 book "Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor," which was about the murderess Jean Harris. Born the youngest of three children of Polish Jewish immigrants, her family did not practice Judaism. Her family was touring Europe when World War I started, and her childhood memory of this trip was the confusion of trying to return to safety in the United States. After graduating cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1924 majoring in art history, she and a classmate toured Paris. Her mother died in 1926. On June 12, 1929, she married to literary critic, Lionel Trilling, who was the first Jewish tenured professor of English at Columbia University. She had a position at NBC but resigned with her marriage. Her father's business bankrupted during the Depression, as well as her father-in-law's. Her father died in 1932 and her in-laws became dependent on Lionel's income. With her husband's contacts, the couple became a part of the left-wing writers known as the New York Intellectuals. She lived in a time when wives stayed at home and the husband was the breadwinner. She became involved with the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners and the injustice of the "Scottsboro Boys" case in Alabama. Her career as a literary critic did not begin until her mid-thirties, when she began writing for "The Nation." She wrote the weekly column "Fiction in Review." Going against many of their left-wing colleagues, she and her husband were staunch anti-Communist. She gave birth to her only child, James, in 1947 and in 1948, she left her position at "The Nation" to become a freelance writer. She realized that her greatest literary competition and critic was her husband. In the 1950s "Look" magazine paid her $3,000 for her article "The Case for the American Woman." In the spring of 1975, her husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, dying in November. With her vision failing, she used a Dictaphone to produce her last book. Trilling's 1993 autobiographical book, "The Beginning of the Journey" stops abruptly two pages after her husband's death; there was no chapter "Life After Lionel." Her last written piece was "A Visit to Camelot," which detailed her and Lionel's white-tie evening at the Kennedy White House on April 29, 1962. Shortly before her death in 1996, she finished the piece, which was printed in the "New Yorker" magazine in June of 1997. Her other books include "Claremont Essays in 1964, "We Must March My Darlings: A Critical Decade" in 1977, and "Reviewing the Forties" in 1979. She published articles in various periodicals including "Partisan Review," "The New York Times," "Harper's Bazaar," "Vogue," "Esquire," "Commentary," "Newsweek," and "Times Literary Supplement." She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976.