The moral obligation to be intelligent : selected essays / Lionel Trilling ; [edited and with an introduction by Leon Wieseltier].

Originally published in 2000 by Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Include bibliographical references (p. 557-229) and index.

The America of John Dos Passos -- Hemingway and his critics -- T.S. Eliot's politics -- The immortality of ode -- Kipling -- Reality in America -- Art and neurosis -- Manners, morals, and the novel -- The Kinsey report -- Huckleberry Finn -- The Princess Casamassima -- Wordsworth and the Rabbis -- William Dean Howells and the roots of modern taste -- The poet as hero: Keats in his letters -- George Orwell and the politics of truth -- The situation of the American intellectual at the present time -- Mansfield Park -- Isaac Babel -- The morality of inertia -- "That smile of Parmenides made me think" -- The last lover -- A speech on Robert Frost: a cultural episode -- On the teaching of modern literature -- The Leavis-Snow controversy -- The fate of pleasure -- James Joyce in his letters -- Mind in the modern world -- Art, will, and necessity -- Why we read Jane Austen.

Bringing together the thoughts of one of American literature s sharpest cultural critics, this compendium will open the eyes of a whole new audience to the work of Lionel Trilling. Trilling was a strenuous thinker who was proud to think too much. As an intellectual he did not spare his own kind, and though he did not consider himself a rationalist, he was grounded in the world."