Word: highbrowed
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Post asserts, as one speaking with authority, that the youthful intelligentsia, occupying strategic positions in the publicity section of the literary world as editors and contributors to the "highbrow" weeklies, critics of books and the drama, colyumists and readers for publishing houses, have combined to form not alone a mutual admiration society, but also an exclusive literary coterie, admission to which is denied candidates who have not the personal friendship of the charter members. Only thoroughgoing social radicals are welcome. Clearness and cleanness, coupled with a sound belief in American institutions, is a fatal...
...that dramatic critics will spend a thousand words analyzing a bad play and dismiss the best musical comedy with a paragraph ? Is it mere snobbishness and highbrow affectation that makes them assume that no musical show, however good, is worthy of their heavy artillery? One is inclined to think that this is not altogether the case. Most musical shows are produced by men of stereotyped minds and artistic ignorance who follow the same formulae year after year in the same unimaginative way. Its resistance to change and innovation is stronger than that of a Buddhist Llama and its prevailing keynote...
...lamentable public sentiment which supports our pink and green and yellow journals to "pander to the blood lust of a host of lowbrow readers". In this part of the world there have been so many murder stories recently, reported of necessity by even the best newspapers, that the genuine highbrow (a species which appears to be dangerously near extinction in the welter of blood and bullets) must discontinue his newspaper subscriptions altogether and cling to the Literary Digest. Any other publication would be sure to contain detective stories...
This brings up the question what is the purpose of the drama? Is it to educated, edify of amuse the audience. If it is maintained that is to educate above anything else, the cry, "highbrow" is raised and the play falls. If it purpose is to amuse, it falls under professor Baker's ban as being judged merely for its business qualifications. But if a play is not judged by its selling capacity, the same danger arises, as with "Little" the atres,--the danger of an appeal to the intelligentsia only and appeal too narrow to be representative. The audience...
...that the term "prize play" is a trifle misleading. For while "Mamma's Affair", which won for Miss Butler the Morosco prize for 1919, is an interesting and often clever little piece, it can scarcely be termed anything very exceptional. Certainly it is free from the taint of being "highbrow" which is so often associated with the name of Harvard, and a well-filled house received with apparent enjoyment the oft repeated walling of "mamma", who is a "sentimental hypochrondiac". The first act is slow, the second good, the third excellent. If we admit that a prize play may have...