William Chace's study of Lionel Trilling is the work of a young man who is not Jewish and not from New York and who “was born exactly one year before the German invasion of Poland.” For Mr. Chace Stalin “is … a name, not an experience,” and he scrupulously warns us that he does “not know at first hand many aspects of the modern experience of ideological conflict.” My own perspective is precisely the opposite. I am Jewish and from New York. Both World War II and Stalin were more than names for me, they were experiences. Despite the difference in perspective, I find Chace's portrait of Trilling's mind both recognizable and congenial. Chace has none of the sixties' rage against the weakness of the liberal imagination, nor is there that passionate revulsion from the experience of Stalinism that can create another kind of distortion. His view has the disadvantages as well as the advantages of distance, but his study succeeds in touching upon most of the important issues in Trilling's work in a way that enables the reader to advance and complicate the discussion.

The first three chapters of the book attempt to place Trilling in his historical context, particularly in his relation to politics and his Jewish identity.