The Journey Abandoned : The Unfinished Novel / Lionel Trilling; Geraldine Murphy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Trilling, Lionel, author.

Contributor:

Murphy, Geraldine, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Young men--Fiction.

Young men.

Conduct of life--Fiction.

Conduct of life.

New York (N.Y.)--Fiction.

New York (N.Y.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (220 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2008]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In 1947, Lionel Trilling, the prominent literary critic, published a novel entitled The Middle of the Journey. While conducting research in the archives at Columbia University, Geraldine Murphy discovered a second novel-a clean, well-crafted "third" of a book that Trilling described as having "point, immediacy, warmth under control, drama, and even size." The Journey Abandoned was supposed to be a novel about the anomalies of heroic action in a conformist age. Instead, published here for the first time, it is a highly personal portrait of the life of letters in America. Jorris Buxton, the narrative's larger-than-life focus, is an elderly poet and novelist turned distinguished mathematical physicist. Modeled on the romantic poet Walter Savage Landor, Buxton is destined to embroil himself in a principled but somewhat absurd conflict, just as the aged Landor had, and through his folly complicate the lives of his admirers. These memorable characters include Garda Thorne, a beautiful short-story writer (and Buxton's former mistress); Harold Outram, the director of an influential private foundation and a compromised man of letters; Philip Dyas, the headmaster of a private school; the Hollowells, a wealthy, progressive couple; Marion Cathcart, a young woman of Outram's household; and Vincent Hammell, an untried literary man from the Midwest and Buxton's newly appointed biographer. Hammell is the central consciousness of the novel. A young man from the provinces, he is drawn from Trilling's own experience yet also indebted to the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, the literary form Trilling admired as a critic and emulated, in these pages, as a novelist. In her introduction, Murphy considers how The Journey Abandoned (which is her title) relates to the critical ideas Trilling articulated in his famous essay collection, The Liberal Imagination. She speculates that Henry James came to displace Landor as the model for Jorris Buxton, a development that may have both inspired and inhibited the writing of this novel.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A Note on the Manuscript and Related Materials

Trilling's Preface

The Unfinished Novel

Trilling's Commentary

Appendix

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9780231144506

0231144504

9780231513494

0231513496

OCLC:

861793209