Interviews with Dwight Macdonald / edited by Michael Wreszin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Macdonald, Dwight.

Contributor:

Wreszin, Michael.

Series:

Conversations with public intellectuals series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Macdonald, Dwight.

Intellectuals.

United States--Intellectual life--20th century.

United States.

Intellectual life.

Popular culture--United States--History--20th century.

Popular culture.

History.

United States--Politics and government--20th century.

Politics and government.

United States--Social conditions--20th century.

Social conditions.

Macdonald, Dwight--Interviews.

Intellectuals--United States--Interviews.

Genre:

Interviews.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 181 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2003]

Summary:

Michael Wreszin, the biographer of Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), has brought together this representative selection of interviews with Macdonald, one of the most acute observers of American politics, society, and culture in the twentieth century. A so-called "New York Intellectual," he edited Partisan Review for seven years. Many still consider Macdonald's consistently provocative journal Politics to be the best independent journal of opinion ever published in America. These interviews, including one conducted by Diana Trilling, span the years 1960 to 1980. They show the wide and penetrating scope of Macdonald's interests -- Trotskyism, anarchism, pacifism, literature, culture, education, the Holocaust and totalitarianism, film criticism, and anti-Vietnam War protest. As a left-of-center thinker who could be both radical and conservative, Macdonald was intellectually equipped to engage in controversy and debate. He had an instinctive grasp of the significant fact and an uncanny ability to bring the issues before the public in marvelously precise and witty prose. His instinct for exposing cant and hypocrisy and his consistent candor have reminded many of George Orwell.

Macdonald decried the demise of literary and artistic standards and of the cheapening and vulgarizing of society. Thus, to his misfortune, post-modern critics too often classify this outspoken, extraordinary thinker as a cultural elitist or at best as a traditionalist. One of his unrelenting concerns was what now is called the "dumbing down" of America. Appalled at the "spreading ooze," he frowned upon America's eagerness to embrace "mass culture" and "popular culture," terms he is credited for coining. In his view, the corruption of language and the commodification of art and literature were a great threat to society. For him, choosing the right word was not only an aesthetic matter. It was a moral choice.

Contents:

Ex-"Revolutionist" Visits Yale / Jeffrey F. Thomas 3

Macdonald Interview: Just a Big Family / Peter M. Perez 5

Dwight Macdonald Interview / Mike Tracey 7

Today Show with Dwight Macdonald / Hugh Downs 14

An Informal Discussion on Film / UC, Santa Barbara 18

Dwight Macdonald Interview / Roy Newquist 22

Unpublished Response to a Questionnaire Esquire 33

Portrait of a Man Reading Book World 38

Interview with Dwight Macdonald / Jack Graves 45

Please, High Culture: An Interview with Critic Dwight Macdonald / F. Anthony Macklin 48

Brooks Shot Right out of Saddle by Critic's Blazing Crossfire / Jeff Simon 70

Conservative Anarchism: An Interview with Dwight Macdonald / Paul Kurtz 77

Interview with Dwight Macdonald / Esther Harriott 90

Notes from Interview with Dwight Macdonald / Alan Wald 104

Interview with Dwight Macdonald / Paul Avrich 113

Interviewing Dwight Macdonald / Diana Trilling 115

Dwight Macdonald Interview / Shirley Broughton 159.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

157806533X

1578065348

OCLC:

50518916