Macdonald, Dwight, 1906–82, American author and editor, b. New York City. As an associate editor (1928–36) of the business magazine Fortune he acquired a distaste for capitalism, and in 1937 he became editor of the radical Partisan Review. In the left-wing factionalism of the 1930s and 40s, Macdonald moved from Stalinism to Trotskyism and then to pacifism and to anarchism. In 1943 he left Partisan Review, protesting its support of World War II. As a vehicle for his wry and intensely personal essays he founded Politics (monthly 1944–47; quarterly 1947–49). His works include Henry Wallace (1948), The Root Is Man (1953), and The Ford Foundation (1956). His Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1957) traces his philosophy through his articles. Against the American Grain (1962) comprises his essays deploring the effects of mass culture on the arts, a subject that dominated his later articles. Other collections of his essays and reviews include Dwight Macdonald on Movies (1969), Politics Past (1970), and Discriminations (1974).
See M. Wreszin, ed., A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald (2001); S. Whitfield, A Critical American (1984); M. Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition (1994).
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