Talk:Dwight Macdonald

Lacks personal information found in other articles: early life, marriages, info about last days.
and no picture. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Benvhoff (talk • contribs) 02:07, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

I agree. Macdonald's picture should be in the article. Anyone have a source? — Preceding unsigned comment added by American In Brazil (talk • contribs) 01:38, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

Article is incomplete w/o account of final years and passing. Agree needs picture and also "legacy". Page covers politics and little else. Little sense of why this critic was important.68.178.50.46 (talk) 01:46, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Politics
We begin, "Dwight Macdonald broke with Leon Trotsky on the matter of the Kronstadt rebellion (March 1921), which Trotsky and the Bolsheviks had suppressed; he then progressed towards democratic socialism."

This is out of the blue. We give no indication prevly (nor subseqly) that Macdonald was an admirer of Trotsky as a Philips Exeter student (15 years old in 1921) or as a journalist in the early career that is covered prevly (1929–1936, age mid/late 20s). Indeed, we say there that "his politics were radicalized by the Great Depression".

--P64 (talk) 18:12, 28 March 2015 (UTC)


 * "Browbeaten: Dwight Macdonald's war on Midcult", Louis Menand, A Critic at Large, The New Yorker, September 5, 2011
 * Quote: "Macdonald began his intellectual career in the nineteen-thirties, in the center ring of the great political cockfight between the Stalinists and the Trotskyists in New York City, ..." --quoted by Double Take, evidently in the same issue
 * --P64 (talk) 18:20, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, the history presented by this sentence is garbled and impossible. From a quick look, he criticized Trotsky on Kronstadt as a Trotskyist in the 1930s, not as a 15-year old (!) and did not break with Trotskyism over that. The reference cited, Mattson has nothing on this on that page. has some history which makes sense.John Z (talk) 19:22, 30 June 2021 (UTC)