Dwight Macdonald – 1906-1982

During the 1940s, Macdonald made his debut as a man of letters by founding the magazine Politics, which published work by the most important literary, philosophical, and political thinkers of the day. He earned widespread notoriety as an extraordinarily perceptive film critic and staff writer for The New Yorker (1951-1971) and Esquire magazine (1960–1966), but his most important contribution to American intellectual life was his analysis of what he called “middlebrow” (as opposed to “highbrow” and “lowbrow”) culture, which included most of mass or popular American culture. He was one of the first genuinely perceptive critics to take popular culture seriously and to write about it in ways that illuminate American values and the American character.