Word: middlebrow
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...refined, improved and expanded-not changed. But since it reflects the growing sophistication of its sources, the Digest is now a notably slicker product than the one founded in 1922, on 4,000 borrowed dollars, by a Minnesota minister's son with an infallible instinct for middlebrow tastes. More than anything else, though, the Reader's Digest is a monument to DeWitt Wallace's reading habits-multiplied 22 million times...
...face is both smaller and less elegant than the old font; the color illustrations are bright and ugly, and the charming obscurities once collected at the bottom of each page have either been eliminated or squeezed into the general text. Newness cries out raucously everywhere from this ill-conceived, middlebrow foofaraw. Look on these words, ye mighty, and despair...
Died. Henry Seidel Canby, 82, scholarly critic who, as founder and editor (1924-36) of the Saturday Review of Literature and chief judge (1926-58) of the Book-of-the-Month Club, was literary arbiter for millions of American readers, highbrow and middlebrow alike; of cancer; in Ossining, N.Y. Biographer of Whitman and Thoreau, author or editor of nearly three dozen other books, Canby was a reliable, middle-of-the-road literary leader whose job, as he saw it, was to "pass on sound values to the reading public...
Harold and Barbara Rhodes are gentle, guileless, upper middle class and upper middlebrow. He is 34, she is 27, and their only sadness is a slightly self-conscious chagrin at not having had a child. The France they visit in 1948 is still digging its way out of rubble and through ration books, still bitterly preoccupied with sour memories of the war and occupation years. The Rhodeses are the kind of Americans who think them selves a cut above Americans, other American tourists at any rate. To get beyond the brief cultural encounters of hotels, museums and sightseeing tours, they...
...Hemingway's biblical excesses (the excesses which MacDonald so perceptively attacks a few pages later). Perhaps some day, in some other little magazine, someone will write an article on the hidden danger of high class Midcult--an article perhaps that will examine more adequately the strange elasticity of the middlebrow mind...