Dwight Macdonald
American critic and editor (1906–1982), founder and editor of the independent leftist quarterly politics (1944–1949), later a staff writer for The New Yorker and a political columnist for Esquire. Mailer meets him at the March 1949 Waldorf Conference — the start of a prickly, lifelong intellectual exchange that will culminate in shared participation at the 21 October 1967 Pentagon march, the opening scene of The Armies of the Night.
Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) was one of the so-called New York intellectuals — a group that also included Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, and Irving Howe. He edited Partisan Review from 1937 until 1943, when he broke with the magazine over its support of Allied participation in WWII and founded his own quarterly, politics, which he edited and largely wrote from 1944 through its final issue in 1949. From 1951 he wrote for The New Yorker; from the late 1950s he wrote political commentary, film criticism, and essays for a wide range of outlets.
Mailer meets Macdonald at the Waldorf Conference in March 1949. Macdonald’s report on the conference, “The Waldorf Conference” (49.1), runs in the final issue of politics and quotes Mailer’s “Trojan horse” remarks at length.
The two will re-encounter each other as participants in the 21 October 1967 March on the Pentagon — alongside Robert Lowell and Noam Chomsky — an event central to The Armies of the Night (see 1967, 1968).