Dwight Macdonald was a prominent member of a group of American critics posthumously called the New York Intellectuals. Editor of the avant-garde journal Partisan Review from 1937‑43, his real legacy lies in the series of unforgiving, inflammatory and ferociously witty essays he wrote during the 50s, 60s and 70s. Most of his work is out of print now, but this new collection edited by John Summers aims to right this wrong and prove Macdonald's enduring relevance as a cultural watchdog.

Macdonald's core concern was a perceived breakdown of traditional cultural values at the hands of commercialism and the mass cultural consumption that was rampant in postwar America, a country he defined as "so smoothly prosperous, so deeply frustrating". His masterpiece, "Masscult and Midcult", is a savage indictment of the middlebrow culture he saw rising around him – mass culture masquerading as high art, promoted by money-hungry businessmen and consumed by the public unawares. Considering the current cultural landscape, in which many view Lady Gaga and Damien Hirst as idiosyncratic luminaries, his views on the commodification of culture were nothing if not prophetic.

If, politically, Macdonald was a confused and often erratic radical, intellectually he was a staunch conservative; he was against the grain in more ways than one. It's this unresolved contradiction that makes his essays so thrilling and complex. Culture eventually got the better of him, moving steadily into realms that he was unwilling to decipher, but in which a new generation of critics such as Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe felt at home: Madconald stopped short at Jackson Pollock and rock'n'roll. He once stated: "They [critics] scare easy because their brains are where their cojones should be and because they have no loyalty." It seems safe to assume he was not referring to himself.