This entertainingly outspoken, very left-wing critic expounded for some 40 years on film, literature, culture and politics. Born into an upper-middle class New York family, Macdonald was educated at Exeter and Yale, and got his first literary job editing the new magazine Fortune in late 1929. He resigned in 1936 over an editorial disagreement, and about this time "evolved from a liberal into a radical and from a tepid Communist sympathizer into an ardent anti-Stalinist". He revived the Partisan Review in 1937 and began contributing Trotskyite articles to New International in 1938. He also