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This “indeterminate specimen” Macdonald would eventually categorize as Midcult, the culture of middlebrow aspiration. Mass culture, he decided, could be left to the masses. The real enemy was the literature, music, theater, art, and criticism of middle-class high-mindedness. It threatened to replace high culture as the art and literature of educated people, and, over the next ten years, Macdonald turned much of his critical might to the job of identifying it, exposing its calculated banalities, and, often with genuine success, persuading readers of its meretriciousness.

Macdonald was now at The New Yorker. He had written occasionally for the magazine since 1928; after closing down Politics, he began contributing regularly. His editor was William Shawn, who took over as editor in chief in 1952, following the death of Harold Ross. One of Macdonald’s first long pieces as a staff writer was a demolition job on the Encyclopedia Britannica’s fifty-four-volume edition, with Syntopicon (a two-volume index of topics), of the Great Books of the Western World, and on the enterprise’s Aristotle, the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler. It was easy to have sport with this ponderous production, and Shawn was pleased with the piece. He encouraged Macdonald to find more middlebrow monuments to demolish. Macdonald was happy to do so (in part because for the first time since his Fortune days, he was getting decently paid for his work). He took on the Revised Standard Version of the King James Bible (in 1953); the young British writer Colin Wilson’s popular work of popular philosophy, The Outsider (1956); and Webster’s Third International Dictionary (1962). (Macdonald had to publish his classic evisceration of James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed in Commentary, in 1958, because the novel had been rapturously praised in The New Yorker by Brendan Gill. Macdonald did not fail to mention Gill’s review several times in his piece.)

Sometime in the mid-1950s, Jason Epstein, who was the founder of the original trade paperback line, Anchor Books, and who was now an editor at Random House, gave Macdonald a contract for a book on popular culture. Macdonald struggled with the project. He was never a book writer. He had spent months, back in the 1930s, taking notes for a book on dictators, and couldn’t get anywhere with it. It was not just that his talent was for magazine pieces. He also distrusted what he called Big Issue books, works such as Burnham’s books, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, William Whyte’s Organization Man, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and C. Wright Mills’s White Collar—which he reviewed rather brutally (“boring to the point of unreadability”) in Partisan Review. (Mills was an old friend who had been a close collaborator on Politics.) He frequently mentioned these titles disparagingly, as mere instigators of intellectual vogues. So it is unsurprising that the two-part essay he produced in lieu of a book, “Masscult and Midcult,” was not Macdonald at his most coherent or persuasive. He was obliged to generalize and theorize, and those were not his strengths. But the essay stands as a kind of summa of the New York highbrow’s contempt for bourgeois culture, and it served as introduction and polemical ballast for the collection Against the American Grain, which was published, by Random House, in 1962.

And why shouldn’t Shawn have been pleased with Macdonald’s mighty takedowns of middlebrow enterprises like Adler’s Great Books? The subjects made for juicy, witty, intelligent journalism; readers loved them and wrote many letters saying so; and they attracted widespread attention. And there might have been another reason lurking in the shadows somewhere. Shawn was an enigmatic figure. He made a highly successful magazine even more successful by adding some gravitas to its traditionally lighthearted and insouciant pages. In the 1950s, The New Yorker became an icon of literary respectability for the educated classes. It flattered their sense of their own good