With this re-publication of Lionel Trilling"s finest essays, Leon Wieseltier offers readers of many generations, a rich overview of Trilling"s achievement. The exhilarating essays collected here include justly celebrated masterpieces - on Mansfield Park and on "Why We Read Jane Austen"; on Twain, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Isaac Babel; on Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost; on "Art and Neurosis"; and the famous Preface to Trilling"s book The Liberal Imagination.