Lionel Mordecai Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher.

With his wife Diana Trilling (née Rubin), whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review.

He was a popular instructor and for thirty years taught Columbia's Colloquium on Important Books, a course about the relationship between literature and cultural history, with Jacques Barzun.

His students included Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Donald M. Friedman,[4] Allen Ginsberg, Eugene Goodheart, Steven Marcus, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Cynthia Ozick, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, George Stade, David Lehman, Leon Wieseltier, Louis Menand, Robert Leonard Moore[5] and Norman Podhoretz.

[10] The Partisan Review was associated with the New York Intellectuals – Trilling, his wife Diana Trilling, Lionel Abel, Hannah Arendt, William Barrett, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, Richard Thomas Chase, F. W. Dupee, Leslie Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Clement Greenberg, Elizabeth Hardwick, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Hilton Kramer, Steven Marcus, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, William Phillips, Norman Podhoretz, Harold Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz, and Susan Sontag – who emphasized the influence of history and culture upon authors and literature.

In his preface to the essays collection, Beyond Culture (1965), Trilling defended the New York Intellectuals: "As a group, it is busy and vivacious about ideas, and, even more, about attitudes.

The structure of our society is such that a class of this kind is bound by organic filaments to groups less culturally fluent that are susceptible to its influence."

[14] Trilling's novel, The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel, is set in the 1930s and involves a young protagonist, Vincent Hammell, who seeks to write a biography of an older poet, Jorris Buxton.

Buxton's character is loosely based on the nineteenth century Romantic poet Walter Savage Landor.

[14] Writer and critic Cynthia Ozick praised the novel's "skillful narrative" and "complex characters", writing, "The Journey Abandoned is a crowded gallery of carefully delineated portraits whose innerness is divulged partly through dialogue but far more extensively in passages of cannily analyzed insight.

An often-quoted summary of Trilling's politics is that he wished to:[16] [Remind] people who prided themselves on being liberals that liberalism was ... a political position which affirmed the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity, and difficulty.Of ideologies, Trilling wrote, "Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties and of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

[21][page needed] Trilling has alternatively been characterized as solidly moderate, as evidenced by many statements, ranging from the very title of his novel, The Middle of the Journey, to a central passage from the novel:[22] An absolute freedom from responsibility – that much of a child none of us can be.