These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

One journalist called the 1950s “the age of the slob.” It was also the age of the snob. Dwight Macdonald memorably lamented the rise of packed, boxed, and price-tagged, middlebrow mass culture—“masscult,” he dubbed it, as if it were a soft drink—especially in the form of trashy paperback novels and ticky-tacky TV shows produced for the sprawling and suburban middle class by corporations, arbitrated not by taste but by sales and ratings. Art is the creation of individuals in communities, Macdonald argued; middlebrow culture is a product manufactured and packaged for the masses. “Masscult is bad in a new way,” Macdonald wrote. “It doesn’t even have the theoretical possibility of being good.”