Irving Howe was on the warpath. The year was 1954, and Howe saw the forces of depravity closing in. He saw the great maw of middle class commercialism — magazines, publishing houses, movie studios. Vast institutions that could buy you off, beat you down, crush your spirit. Howe surveyed the landscape and saw the broken souls of his colleagues: “Writers today have no choice, often enough, but to write for magazines like the New Yorker — and worse, far worse.”

The horror of it was almost too much to contemplate. But intellectuals of that age didn’t flinch. They had located a force that threatened to destroy civilization, and that force was dubbed “middlebrow” (Virginia Woolf’s term). Middle class Americans were trying to educate themselves. These arrivistes were reading the Saturday Review and the New York Times Book Review and tromping with their moralistic steps over everything that was sacred and subtle. The middle classes were going to museums and joining the Book of the Month Club, admiring “literature” in the form of Thornton Wilder and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. They were creating a new form of consumer culture.