Dwight MacDonald
| Dwight Macdonald | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 24, 1906 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | November 29, 1982 (aged 76) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Education |
Yale University Phillips Exeter Academy |
| Occupation | writer, editor, essayist, film critic, book critic, social critic, philosopher |
| Employer |
The New Yorker (staff writer) Partisan Review (editor) politics (founder and editor) The New York Review of Books (book critic) The Today Show (film critic) |
Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was a U.S. writer, editor, film critic, social critic, philosopher, and political radical.
Dwight Macdonald was born in New York City to a prosperous Protestant family from Brooklyn and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Yale University. At university, he was editor of The Yale Record, the student humor magazine. As a student at Yale, he also was a member of Psi Upsilon; his first job was as a trainee executive for the Macy's department store company.
In 1929, Macdonald was employed at Time magazine; he had been offered a job by Henry Luce, a fellow alumnus at Yale University. In 1930, he became the associate editor of Fortune, then a new publication created by Luce. Like many writers on Fortune, his politics were radicalized by the Great Depression. He resigned from the magazine in 1936 over an editorial dispute, when the magazine's executives severely edited the last installment of his extended four-part attack on U.S. Steel.
In 1934, he married Nancy Gardiner Rodman (1910–1996), sister of Selden Rodman and credited as the person who "radicalized" him. He is the father of filmmaker and author Nicholas Macdonald; and of Michael Macdonald.
Dwight Macdonald was an editor of the Partisan Review magazine from 1937 to 1943; but, in the course of editorial disagreements, about the degree, the practice, and the principles of political, cultural, and literary criticism, he quit to establish politics, a magazine of more out-spoken and leftist editorial perspective, which he published from 1944 to 1949.
As an editor, he fostered intellectuals (academic and public), such as Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Bruno Bettelheim, and C. Wright Mills. Besides his editorial work, he also was a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, from 1952 to 1962, and was the movie critic for Esquire magazine. In the 1960s, the quality of his movie-review work for Esquire granted Macdonald public exposure in the American cultural mainstream, as a movie reviewer for The Today Show, a daytime television talk-show program.
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