Dwight MacDonald

Dwight MacDonald (1906-1982) was an American writer, editor, critic, and political gadfly. A prominent member of the group known as the New York Intellectuals, he served as the editor of first Partisan Review and his journal Politics. He later became a staff writer for The New Yorker, Esquire's film critic, and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Masscult and Midcult - Essays Against the American Grain By Dwight MacDonald Edited by John Summers Introduction by Louis Menand In Masscult & Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, first published in 1962, MacDonald turned his formidable critical attention to what he saw as a new, and potentially catastrophic, development in the history of Western civilization: the influence-by turns distorting, destructive, and inadvertently ridiculous-of mass culture on high culture. Category: Essays, Criticism and Philosophy Publisher: NYRB Classics