Dwight Macdonald - Mass-cult and Mid-cult

Mass-cult and Mid-cult

During the later 1950s and the 1960s, MacDonald wrote cultural criticism, particularly of the rise of mass media and middle-brow culture, such as Thornton Wilder's Our Town, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and the Great Books of the Western World. In a December 15, 2011 review of a New York Review of Books re-issue of Macdonald's Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, The New Republic's Franklin Foer writes that Macdonald's effort in that work "culminated in a plea for highbrows to escape from the mass culture." "The highbrows," Foer writes, "would flee to their own hermetic little world, where they could produce art for one another while resolutely ignoring the masses."