John Summers and Louis Menand

Harvard Book Store is very pleased to welcome local intellectual and editor of The Baffler JOHN SUMMERS along with Harvard literature professor LOUIS MENAND for a conversation about the new collection of essays by critic Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain.

Political radical and trenchant essayist Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century American letters. A prominent member of the group known as the New York Intellectuals, he served as the editor of first Partisan Review then and his own journal, Politics. He later became a staff writer for The New Yorker, Esquire’s film critic, and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

In his most famous and controversial essay, “Masscult and Midcult,” Macdonald turns his formidable critical attention to what he sees as a new, and potentially catastrophic, development in the history of Western civilization: the influence—by turns distorting, destructive, and inadvertently ridiculous—of mass culture on high culture. In this new collection of essays, ranging in subject matter from Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, and Tom Wolfe to Webster’s Dictionary and the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Macdonald is shrewd, passionate, and bracingly alive to the complexities of his subject, which he defines as being “not the dead sea of masscult but rather the life of the tide line where higher and lower organisms compete for survival.”

This new collection of essays, published by New York Review of Books, is edited by John Summers, with introduction by Louis Menand.