Dwight Macdonald

This collection features Dwight Macdonald’s prophetic essays on politics, art, and violence in twentieth-century America. What does extreme violence do to human values? Does the concept of collective guilt make sense in assessing responsibility for genocide? Has modern mechanized society forever destroyed the possibility of peaceful resistance through art and civil disobedience? Atrocities of the Mind presents anew Dwight Macdonald, one of America’s foremost literary journalists and political activists, grappling with the hard questions of his time—and ours. In this collection, Macdonald writes about major events—the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Gandhi’s assassination, the Vietnam War, and social phenomena such as mass shootings, campus protests, and police brutality—with clear-sighted and buoyant prose. He writes incisively about the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski. Macdonald praises Dorothy Day’s pacifism, passes around an antiwar petition in the Rose Garden of the White House, and spurs the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty with “Our Invisible Poor.” Norman Mailer memorably called Macdonald “a man with whom one might seldom agree but could never disrespect because he always told the truth as he saw the truth—a man therefore of the most incorruptible integrity.” In an America today that is reeling from political violence, Macdonald’s truth-telling reminds us how we got here and who we might still become.

This collection features Dwight Macdonald’s prophetic essays on politics, art, and violence in twentieth-century America. What does extreme violence do to human values? Does the concept of collective guilt make sense in assessing responsibility for genocide? Has modern mechanized society forever destroyed the possibility of peaceful resistance through art and civil disobedience? Atrocities of the Mind presents anew Dwight Macdonald, one of America’s foremost literary journalists and political activists, grappling with the hard questions of his time—and ours. In this collection, Macdonald writes about major events—the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Gandhi’s assassination, the Vietnam War, and social phenomena such as mass shootings, campus protests, and police brutality—with clear-sighted and buoyant prose. He writes incisively about the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski. Macdonald praises Dorothy Day’s pacifism, passes around an antiwar petition in the Rose Garden of the White House, and spurs the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty with “Our Invisible Poor.” Norman Mailer memorably called Macdonald “a man with whom one might seldom agree but could never disrespect because he always told the truth as he saw the truth—a man therefore of the most incorruptible integrity.” In an America today that is reeling from political violence, Macdonald’s truth-telling reminds us how we got here and who we might still become.

Thirty years since it was first published, Macdonald's masterful book on the Ford Foundation remains the only book-length account of this institution that has been published. Despite the calls for a book carrying on the story from 1956 on the part of Richard Magat and McGeorge Bundy, that book has yet to be written. In his stimulating introduction to this new edition, Francis Sutton suggests why this is so. The Foundation, he observes, has never again aroused as much public interest as it did in the years Macdonald's describes. The announcement that a new program would be launched with the riches that 90 percent of the Ford Motor Company's stock would bring captured the attention of the media all across the country. Its sheer size was astounding; in 1954 the Ford Foundation spent four times as much as the Rockefeller Foundation and ten times as much as the Carnegie Corporation. Its expenditures were very large in relation to the budgets of the institutions that looked to it for help. Consequently, the American public waited expectantly to see what this huge foundation would do. But the Ford Foundation was not only big; it was controversial in those years, and inspired activism in the media, Congressional investigations, and political wrath. Macdonald nicely captures the American ambivalence toward large bureacratic organizations, which the Ford Foundation epitomizes, with its own language and, one might argue, its own values. Sutton points out that Macdonald's writing also sets a model for foundation history and indeed philanthropic history, with a poised, ironic detachment that has remained rare. His introduction points out the main themes of Macdonald's book and examines the extent to which they continue to illumine the foundation in the years since this book was first published. It looks at how well the Foundation has addressed the objectives it set for itself, and nicely captures the giant changes that this giant foundation has experienced through the 1960s and 1970s, to the present day.

A New York Review Books Original. Political radical, trenchant essayist, and impresario of the New York Intellectuals, Dwight MacDonald was one of the towering figures of twentieth century American letters. In Masscult & Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, first published in 1962, MacDonald turned his formidable critical attention to what he saw 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 essays that range 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." Prescient, profound, at once scathing and hilarious in their indictment of the middlebrow sensibility, the pieces in this volume constitute an indispensable work of criticism born out of and informed by the conviction that "a people that loses contact with its past becomes culturally psychotic."

Partisan Review, V9, No. 2, March-April, 1942 is a literary journal that features various essays, articles, and reviews written by prominent writers and intellectuals of the time. The journal includes contributions from Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, and William Phillips, among others. The topics covered in the journal range from literary criticism to political commentary, with a focus on the cultural and social issues of the time. The publication is a valuable resource for scholars and students of literature, history, and culture who are interested in exploring the intellectual debates of the early 20th century. Additional Editors Include William Phillips, And Philip Rahv. Includes The Articles French Writers Under Hitler, By Frank Jones; Letters To The Editor, By T. S. Eliot; London Letter, By George Eliot And Many Others. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Thirty years since it was first published, Macdonald's masterful book on the Ford Foundation remains the only book-length account of this institution that has been published. Despite the calls for a book carrying on the story from 1956 on the part of Richard Magat and McGeorge Bundy, that book has yet to be written. In his stimulating introduction to this new edition, Francis Sutton suggests why this is so. The Foundation, he observes, has never again aroused as much public interest as it did in the years Macdonald's describes. The announcement that a new program would be launched with the riches that 90 percent of the Ford Motor Company's stock would bring captured the attention of the media all across the country. Its sheer size was astounding; in 1954 the Ford Foundation spent four times as much as the Rockefeller Foundation and ten times as much as the Carnegie Corporation. Its expenditures were very large in relation to the budgets of the institutions that looked to it for help. Consequently, the American public waited expectantly to see what this huge foundation would do. But the Ford Foundation was not only big; it was controversial in those years, and inspired activism in the media, Congressional investigations, and political wrath. Macdonald nicely captures the American ambivalence toward large bureacratic organizations, which the Ford Foundation epitomizes, with its own language and, one might argue, its own values. Sutton points out that Macdonald's writing also sets a model for foundation history and indeed philanthropic history, with a poised, ironic detachment that has remained rare. His introduction points out the main themes of Macdonald's book and examines the extent to which they continue to illumine the foundation in the years since this book was first published. It looks at how well the Foundation has addressed the objectives it set for itself, and nicely captures the giant changes that this giant foundation has experienced through the 1960s and 1970s, to the present day.