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DWIGHT MACDONALD (1906–1982) was born in New York City and educated at Exeter and Yale. On graduating from college, he enrolled in Macy’s executive training program, but soon left to work for Henry Luce at Time and Fortune, quitting in 1936 because of cuts that had been made to an article he had written criticizing U.S. Steel. From 1937 to 1943, Macdonald was an editor of Partisan Review and in 1944, he started a journal of his own, Politics, whose contributors included Albert Camus, Victor Serge, Simone Weil, Bruno Bettelheim, James Agee, John Berryman, Meyer Schapiro, and Mary McCarthy. In later years, Macdonald reviewed books for The New Yorker, movies for Esquire, and wrote frequently for The New York Review of Books.

JOHN SUMMERS is the editor of The Baffler.

LOUIS MENAND is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of Discovering Modernism, The Metaphysical Club, American Studies, and The Marketplace of Ideas.

MASSCULT AND MIDCULT

Essays Against the American Grain

DWIGHT MACDONALD

Edited by

JOHN SUMMERS

Introduction by

LOUIS MENAND

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

Contents

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

Masscult and Midcult

James Agee

Ernest Hemingway

By Cozzens Possessed

The Book-of-the-Millennium Club

Updating the Bible

The String Untuned

The Triumph of the Fact

Parajournalism: Or, Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine

Norman Cousins’s Flat World

Sources

Introduction

Dwight macdonald was a man who was congenitally incapable of respect for authority, and whose talent and charm made this into an appealing trait of temperament rather than a professional liability. He not only enjoyed provoking; he liked to be provoked. He was nicely endowed to flourish in a provincial culture—the intellectual niche-world of New York City from the 1930s to the 1960s—where trading attacks and high-minded insults with former or future friends was regarded as simply one of the ways that work got done. Macdonald was vociferous, opinionated, and, when he was drunk, nasty and combative (though that was true of many of his peers: it was an alcoholic milieu). He was also, almost serenely, pure of heart. He was easy to quarrel with and, by most accounts, easy to forgive.

Macdonald began his intellectual career in the 1930s at the center of the great political cockfight between the Stalinists and the Trotskyists in New York City, then broke with all sects and sectarians to run his own little magazine in the 1940s, and finally established himself, in the 1950s, as the Lord High Executioner of middlebrow culture. He wrote with a lot of salt and pepper, and when what he wrote was criticized, he joyfully published the criticisms. The English scholar Ian Watt once said of Macdonald that he had “the pugnacious resilience of a Donald Duck.” Watt meant it admiringly.

Macdonald was born, in 1906, on the Upper West Side. His family, though not wealthy, was reasonably well off, and he attended a series of private schools, ending up at Exeter and Yale. At Yale, he put himself in danger of expulsion by writing a column for the Yale Daily News in which he called on the English professor William Lyon Phelps, a campus fixture, not to teach Shakespeare, on the grounds that if Phelps thought it over, he would realize that he was not competent to do so. The dean learned of the column before it was printed and suggested to Macdonald that he would be prudent to withdraw it. Macdonald invoked his right of free speech and the prohibition against prior restraint. The dean said that he had no intention of suppressing the column; he only wanted Macdonald to know that if it ran, he would be kicked out. The column did not appear. That dean was one of the last people known to have persuaded Dwight Macdonald to keep an opinion to himself.

A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist. After Macdonald