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Fiction abandoned.

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The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel, by Lionel Trilling, edited by Geraldine Murphy (Columbia, 224 pp., $26.95)

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A COMBINATION of internal and external factors drove Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) to become one of the most important American moralists of the 20th century, alongside rival figures such as William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Dewey, and Sidney Hook. Trilling's body of writing is a permanent asset to American letters and political history.

A graduate of Columbia University and long an esteemed professor and presence there, Trilling also held visiting lectureships at Harvard and Oxford. His dissertation on Matthew Arnold was published in 1939 and put him in the intellectual company of Irving Babbitt and his most famous student, T. S. Eliot. Arnold's interests in literature, politics, education, and ethics were to be as central to the liberal Trilling as to the conservatives Babbitt and Eliot.

Trilling became best known as a literary critic, with volumes of his essays--The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955), A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), and Beyond Culture (1965)--becoming major works of cultural criticism that affected not only the interpretation and teaching of literature but the sensibilities of a large readership in other academic fields, in the American intelligentsia at large, and in England too. His anthologies with commentaries--The Portable Matthew Arnold (1949), The Experience of Literature (1967), and Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reader (1970)--became major textbooks for the teaching of literature. His 1969-70 Norton Lectures at Harvard were published as Sincerity and Authenticity in 1972, the same year that he delivered the Thomas Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in Washington, D.C. He died of cancer in 1975. His widow, Diana Trilling, outlived him by two decades and edited a new, standard edition of...