Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) was an editor, journalist, essayist, and critic of literature, popular culture, films, and politics.

Dwight Macdonald was born in New York City on March 24, 1906, the son of Dwight and Alice (Hedges) Macdonald. Macdonald attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite private school in Exeter, New Hampshire, and Yale University, from which he graduated in 1928. After trying his hand at becoming a merchandiser in a training program at Macy's, Macdonald, with the help of a friend from Yale, became an associate editor in 1929 of Henry Luce's FORTUNE, the first issue of which appeared in 1930. Macdonald worked on FORTUNE until 1936, when he resigned to protest alterations that the pro-business magazine made in a series of articles he had written about U.S. Steel Corporation.

Macdonald devoted himself in the mid-1930s to discovering his own political philosophy. He read Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky; became an enthusiastic anti-Stalinist; and...