the British poet John Holloway rote about Lionel Trilling: "In our literary-academic world, Trilling has to be called a heroic figure, almost the only one." Since his death in November 1975 at the age of seventy, the encomia to Trilling as a culture hero, at least among Anglo-American literary intellectuals, have only reaffirmed Holloway's tribute. And it is also true that he is the only American intellectual who commands respect across the ideological spectrum, from leading American neoconservative, liberal, and radical intellectuals.Neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz have memorialized Trilling as a foe of the New Left, an opponent of the counterculture, and a defender of humanist values and cultural literacy. The "godfather" of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, has stated that Trilling is one of the "two thinkers who had the greatest subsequent impact on my thinking" in the early postwar era (along with Leo Strauss); later Kristol adds that Trilling was one of the "two intellectual godfathers of my neo-ism" (along with Reinhold Niebuhr).Meanwhile, Left-liberals such as Morris Dickstein and Gerald Graft have emphasized Trilling's high critical standards and his Arnoldian aspiration to reinvigorate liberalism, not abandon it. Admittedly, a few academic radicals have scorned Trilling as the "godfather" of neoconservatism, whose work leads to "an intellectual dead end" (Cornel West). But other Left academics have honored Trilling with book-length studies devoted to his work and legacy, arguing that he, was a conservator, though not a conservative: A "subversive patriarch" with conserving impulses (Dan O' Hara) and a liberal cultural critic (Mark Krupnick) whose compelling essays guided postwar intellectuals' rightward steps away from progressive politics.Trilling left no political testament. Indeed, he died just before debates between the neocons and liberal-Left heated up in the mid-1970s. And whatever his sentiments in his private conversations, he never publicly sided with emergent neocons such as Podhoretz. In an odd way, he died at precisely the "right time" to become an object of contention by both the Right and