Dwight MacDonald was a literary critic who flourished in the Fifties and published in Partisan Review an article and then a book called “MassCult and MidCult” which I realized has deeply lasted with me ever since I read it just a few years after it was written, His contention that there were three mentalities about literature even if the term “mentality” had not yet come into vogue. MacDonald said that there was low brow culture, which included Charlie Chaplin and Betty Boop, filled with farce and sentimentality, which everyone found accessible; high grade culture, such as Mann and Joyce, which was difficult to master but profound, and so read by only an elite who were given to rarified perceptions and experiences and meanings; and the worst of the three, middle brow literature, which had the appearance of profundity but was merely melodramatic and cheap in their effects but could cause people to think the works profound, and so were the consumers of middle educated people out to traffic with what they considered literature but was of insufficient quality and so a fake. Such poettasters included Norman Rockwell and John O’Hara and Pearl Buck, their works noted for either cynicism or gloom or, in Rockwell or Saroyan or Wilder, cheeriness that is fake because it is so dedicated to the cliche, just the opposite of art, which expanded and challenged sensibility rather than confirming what already was experienced as such.