num_pages: 448
description: Dwight Macdonald focuses on the American pursuit of culture and its ambiguous results. The usual approach to mass culture has been sociological; Macdonald turns to the subject as a man of letters. "I am concerned not so much with the dead sea of masscult," he writes, "as with the life of the tide line where the decisive struggles for survival take place between higher and lower organisms." In trying to level down the best, Macdonald argues, our democratic society has usually succeeded in leveling up the worst, so that high and low culture merge in a swampy middleground where second-rate writers are acclaimed as geniuses, first-rate writers retreat into private worlds and the language itself begins to decompose. Against the American Grain ranges over many topics: new versions of the Bible; the careers of such heroes and victims of modern culture as Mark Twain, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and James Agee; the national obsession with facts and how-to-do-it books; the 50 volumes of Great Books of the Western World; the new unabridged dictionary; the superiority of English "amateur journalism" to our own professionalized and compartmentalized kind; the sudden inflation and subsequent deflation of such highbrow best sellers as By Love Possessed and The Outsider; and the decline of the English language. It's a conservative and in some ways reactionary book whose thesis may be summed up in its author's words: "A people which loses contact with its past becomes culturally psychotic." It brings together the major essays that Dwight Macdonald wrote from 1952-62.
language: English
title: Against the American Grain: Essays of the Effects of Mass Culture
titlecomplete: Against the American Grain: Essays of the Effects of Mass Culture
genres: Cultural, Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Literature, Essays, Cultural Studies, 20th Century, Criticism, Literary Criticism
ratings_count: 310
publisher: Da Capo Press, Inc.