Robert Warshow was one of the few critics of his day to engage deeply and seriously with popular art and culture. He was an editor of Commentary Magazine who died, at age 37, in 1955.
Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was born in New York and educated at Columbia University, to which he returned as an instructor in 1932, and where he continued to teach in the English department throughout his long and highly distinguished career. Among his many works are critical studies of Matthew Arnold and E. M. Forster; two essay collections, The Liberal Imaginationand The Opposing Self; a novel, The Middle of the Journey; and the Norton lectures at Harvard, entitled Sincerity and Authenticity. Trilling was married to the writer and critic Diana Trilling.Geraldine Murphy is an associate professor of English and Deputy Dean of Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York, CUNY. She… has published essays on Lionel Trilling and the New York Intellectuals and is working on a book-length study, "Anti-Stalinist Poetics."