Gathers essays written during the sixties by such people as Norman Mailer, Marshall McLuhan, Tom Wolfe, Eldridge Cleaver, and others about the changes in art, politics, and the media during that decade
Dwight Macdonald Books
Dwight Macdonald was an American writer and a radical political thinker. As a prominent member of the New York Intellectuals, notably as editor of Partisan Review, he engaged in profound social and cultural critique. His essayistic style was marked by sharp intellect and an uncompromising approach to analyzing American society and culture. Macdonald focused on themes of mass culture, politics, and the role of the intellectual in society.
Masscult and Midcult
- 291 pages
- 11 hours of reading
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.