America in 1950 was a scary place as the Cold War descended on the political and social landscapes.

The Communists held both the A-bomb and China, a brutal East-West war loomed in Korea, thousands of Americans were regretting their support of the Soviet Union and hundreds were targeted by congressional witch-hunters for that support.

That year a Columbia English professor and literary critic dipped his toe into this poisonous mix with his essay collection, "The Liberal Imagination."

When Lionel Trilling wrote about literature at that time, the country listened. "The Liberal Imagination" was a best-seller.

Many of these essays were first published in literary and academic journals with small readerships like The Partisan Review and The American Quarterly, although the Nation and the New York Times Book Review were also outlets.

Seven years earlier, Time magazine, then one of the country's major popular publications, devoted seven pages to discussing Trilling's book on E.M. Forster. He was a frequent guest on radio and TV programs discussing literature and authors.

(For an example, search YouTube for Trilling and Vladimir Nabokov talking about "Lolita" on a Canadian television broadcast.)

There are no critics of Trilling's popularity and stature today. On TV, literature is confined to segments of Oprah Winfrey's afternoon program while only a few public radio stations have offerings strictly on writers and books.

The obvious question seems to be: Why were Americans of the 1950s so interested in a literary critic while today's citizens could care less?

Trilling died in 1975 after writing three more collections -- "The Opposing Self," "Beyond Culture" and the posthumous "The Last Decade."

Columbia University, where he taught literature, held a seminar Oct. 3 on his influences. University of Pittsburgh Mellon professor of English Jonathan Arac, a specialist on American literature, was one of the panelists.

"Trilling's popularity then seemed just as unlikely as it would today," Arac said, contrasting the 1950s with the mid-19th-century when Americans believed "literature had power."

"Century [Illustrated] Magazine had a circulation of more than 100,000 in the 1880s when it published James 'The Bostonians' and William Dean Howells' 'The Rise of Silas Lapham,' " he said.

"Trilling's work was published in The Partisan Review with a circulation less than 3,000."

Yet, his essays in the 1950 collection, particularly "Reality in America," seemed "to hit a culture nerve" in the Cold War.

In that piece, Trilling considered the works of Henry James and Theodore Dreiser and how American critics perceived their novels in a time of "the liberal imagination."

"With that juxtaposition, we are immediately at the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meets," Trilling wrote.

"In that essay, Trilling suggested that the culture issues of the Cold War were highly important," Arac said.

James' subjects were people of a certain class whose lives were circumscribed by their social status whereas Dreiser dealt with the working class and their frustrations to advance.

James' novels were often about ideas and emotions while Dreiser's were melodramas of nasty lives in the streets, slums and offices of American cities.

Trilling, who wrote in his introduction to this collection that "the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not...express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable gestures which seek to resemble ideas" (this written before Fox News!) was also rejecting the so-called liberals of his day for their endorsement of "proletariat" literature like Dreiser's.

"The liberal judgment of Dreiser and James goes back of politics, goes back to the critical assumptions that make politics," he wrote.

Liberals took to Dreiser, despite his clumsy writing, soap-opera plots and anti-Semitism, because he seemed grounded in "reality."

On the other hand, James "was a whole generation removed from the odors of the shop."

Dreiser's novels made him a favorite among American social reformers in the early 1930s and he eventually endorsed communism before dying in 1947. (These reformers were able to overlook his predatory treatment of women and he was fired from a lucrative magazine for having an affair with the daughter of his assistant.)

In rejecting Dreiser and his favorable critics in an era when liberals were under political attack, Trilling stood out as a defender of the novel as an art rather than a political statement.

"For us, it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naive moralizing."

Have things changed that much?

In these times when politics is everywhere, from the economic mess to the privacy of the bedroom, literature seems unimportant, except as entertainment in airport waiting rooms, its role in the political culture of America diminished to a pinprick.

Critics with Trilling's literary acumen exist today; it's simply that literature no longer seems that important.