![]() ![]() The furniture was comfortable, venerable, well upholstered, and, to me, impossible to classify according to the Lynesian cosmology.īorn in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1910 and graduated from Yale in 1934, Lynes as a young man did a stint as a schoolmaster, serving at the Shipley School for girls in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, as assistant principal from 1937 to 1940 and principal from 1940 to 1944. The room where we sat was decorated with works by Ben Shahn, George Grosz, Eugene Berman, Saul Steinberg, and Ralston Crawford. Our interview took place at the townhouse in New York City that he and his wife, Mildred, a lecturer on art, have shared for the past thirty-eight years. His point then was that people’s tastes could no longer be explained by their “wealth or education, by breeding or background,” but that a new social stratification was growing, in which “the highbrows are the elite, the middlebrows are the bourgeoisie, and the lowbrows are hoi polloi.” ![]() Recently, after more than a generation during which Lynes had kept his eyes and ears trained on American social and cultural change, I took occasion to question him about what he believes has happened to our highbrows, middlebrows, and lowbrows since he identified (and perhaps skewered) them in 1949. For a season or so, dividing American objects, pastimes, and people into highbrow, upper or lower middlebrow, and lowbrow was something of a national sport. Nothing Lynes ever did on the subject attracted more attention than an article entitled “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” that appeared in the February 1949 issue of Harper’s (of which Lynes was then managing editor) and a chart on American tastes classified from highbrow to lowbrow that appeared in Life magazine two months later. RUSSELL LYNES, despite being known to his friends as the most amiable of men, is nationally famous as a witty and sometimes acerbic commentator on American society and its manners. ![]()
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