Dickstein

young Morris as the intellectually overachieving, socially insecure yeshiva boy, obsessed with sports and the Rosenbergs; the Columbia undergrad, ardently immersed in a new, secular world of ideas; the miserable graduate student; and the young, passionate professor.”

Dickstein was teaching at Columbia when he had what he remembered as his one painful experience with Trilling.

“I had just submitted a thesis on Keats to the Yale English faculty and, in a moment of spontaneous generosity, he asked if he could read it,” Dickstein wrote in The Times Book Review in 1998. “Keats was a special passion of his, the subject of his longest and richest essay. And then I mentioned that one of my Yale readers — I think it was Cleanth Brooks — had called it ‘Trillingesque.’(it was not at all clear that he meant it as a compliment.)

“Whenever we met, Trilling would insist in the strongest terms that there was nothing he wanted to read more, especially as he himself was somehow in it,” Dickstein added. But, for whatever reason, Trilling never said whether he liked the thesis — or, for that matter, whether he had read it.

“At each encounter,” Dickstein wrote, “there was an elephant in the room: the mild guilt feelings he felt obliged to express, the keen disappointment I failed to conceal.”

Dickstein began teaching at Queens College and the Graduate Center in the early 1970s. He was named distinguished professor in 1994, transferred full time to the Graduate Center in 2002 and formally retired in 2013.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Lore Willner Dickstein; his son, Jeremy; four grandchildren; and his sister, Doris Feinberg.