(1) We are, for better and worse, middle class and middlebrow right down to our bones.(2) No thoughtful reader today would dismiss them as predominantly insipid or expressing nothing beyond a contemporary middlebrow understanding.(3) These are sometimes referred to as romantic novels, but actually, as I understand it, they were more in the nature of middlebrow novels about middle-class family life.(4) They do not like things that the vast middle class, middlebrow population likes.(5) I wish that the middlebrow worshippers of the simple would read the nursery rhymes in the light of their original meaning!(6) I know of no rational argument which convinces me that plays that are enjoyed and discussed by intellectuals are any better than plays which entertain a middlebrow audience.(7) It's already clear that there are a whole bunch of highbrows who talk only to themselves and a horde of middlebrows who simply try to out-bray one another.(8) Since our highbrow elites are no longer capable of giving good advice, we middlebrows must use our own judgment to decide what art to buy.(9) So middlebrows appointed themselves as the defenders of popular taste against the authoritarian edicts of highbrow moral crusaders.(10) Highbrow journals like the Antioch Review and the Partisan Review condemned the middlebrows who controlled the mass media for fostering anti-intellectualism and mindless conformity.
