Dwight Macdonald - Renewed Radicalism

Renewed Radicalism

Primarily a writer for The New Yorker, Macdonald also published more than thirty essays and reviews in The New York Review of Books. His most famous and influential review, of Michael Harrington's The Other America helped to spur the Kennedy Administration's War on Poverty. A reprint of Macdonald's Politics elicited a brief introduction by Hannah Arendt in the New York Review of Books on 1 August 1968.

Later still, he opposed the Vietnam War and defended many student radicals of the 1960s like the Columbia University students who organized a sit in, during which university property and a professor's research was destroyed. In 1968, he signed the pledge of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest”, vowing to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the Vietnam War.