Dwight Macdonald

Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, literary critic, philosopher, and activist. Macdonald was a member of the New York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist magazine Partisan Review for six years. He also contributed to other New York publications including Time, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Politics, a journal which he founded in 1944. Early life and career Macdonald was born on the Upper West Side of New York City to Dwight Macdonald Sr. (–1926) and Alice Hedges Macdonald (–1957), a prosperous Protestant family from Brooklyn. Macdonald was educated at the Barnard School, Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale. 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 and his first job was as a trainee executive for Macy's. In 1929, Macdonald was employed at Time magazine; he had been offered a job by Henry Luce, a fellow Yale alumnus. 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.