Description: Published in 1947 as the Cold War was heating up, Trilling's only novel was a prophetic reckoning with the ideological conflicts that would come to a head in the McCarthy era. But this work of complex deliberation, high passion, and tragic import is no less striking for its richly detailed, often slyly humorous picture of the manners and mores of the intelligentsia.
Review Quotes: "Trilling's beautifully composed novel is set in the late 1930s, when the communist dream embraced by Slesinger's characters was stripped bare by the emerging facts of Stalin's atrocities...Just as Slesinger in her comic world unites politics and sex, so Trilling in his tragic one fuses politics with death." -- Sam Tanenhaus, The Boston Globe
"...this moody document of a vanished intelligentsia anticipates the deepening crisis of the left in the McCarthy years." -- Publishers Weekly
"Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey is a searching account of the liberal's dilemma of conscience in a world surrendering to extremes of dogma, an important first novel by a distinguished critic....Mr. Trilling has sounded a new note of dissent, a more realistic and mature one than the frantic reformism of the thirties and the sterile disillusionment of the twenties." -- The Atlantic Monthly
"A depth that recalls Dostoyevsky and a subtlety worthy of Henry James." -- Listener