The James Logan Courier

By Phillip Reese
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

SACRAMENTO, — Among many ways to show your patriotism: Fly a flag, join the Army, sing along with the national anthem at a game.

Or name your child after a Founding Father.

George Washington Jr., 75, of Sacramento, Calif., isn't sure why his father and grandfather chose that last route. But he's made the most of it.

"It starts conversations," he said. "People look at me and say, 'Ah, George Washington.' Everybody has an amusing comment about that.'"

Washington is one of a dwindling few Californians named for famous patriots.

From Wikipedia:
Lionel Trilling (born Lionel Mordecai Trilling, 4 July 1905 – 5 November 1975) was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has been a subject of continued interest.

Academic life
Lionel Trilling was born in Queens, New York City, to a Jewish family. In 1921, he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, and, at age sixteen, entered Columbia University, thus beginning a perpetual association with the university. In 1925, he graduated from Columbia, and, in 1926, earned a Master of Arts degree. He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and at Hunter College. In 1932, he taught literature at Columbia University. In 1938, he earned his doctorate with a dissertation about Matthew Arnold, that he later published. In 1939, he was promoted to assistant professor — the first tenured Jewish professor in the English department; in 1948, he was promoted to full professor. In 1965, he became the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism. Trilling was a popular instructor, and for 30 years taught, with Jacques Barzun, Columbia’s Colloquium on Important Books, a course about the relationship between literature and cultural history. His students included Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, John Hollander, Cynthia Ozick, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, Louis Menand, and Norman Podhoretz. From 1969 to 1970 he was the Norton professor at Harvard University. In 1972 he was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the first Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, described as "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." Trilling served as a Senior Fellow of the Kenyon School of English and subsequently as a Senior Fellow of the Indiana School of Letters.

Read Regrets Only :Lionel Trilling and his discontents, by Louis Menand.