Memorial for a Revolutionist: Dwight Macdonald,A Critical American

A quarter century after his death in 1982, Dwight Macdonald is, unjustly, a largely forgotten man. But for 35 years, from 1940 to 1975, he was America’s leading literary-intellectual journalist and the best-known cultural critic to the general public. An undogmatic iconoclast and self-professed “revolutionist,” his finest work makes him a worthy descendent of H.L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson. He is worth remembering. John Rodden is the author, most recently, of Every Intellectual’s big brother: George Orwell’s Literary Siblings (2007).