American critics condemned existentialists for valorizing lowbrow American culture

Evidence

One thing about the existentialists seriously bothered American intellectuals, and that was their low taste in American culture — their love of jazz and blues, their interest in the sleazy murders of the Deep South, and their fondness for potboilers about hitmen and psychopaths. Even their more elevated choices in American fiction were suspect, since cultured Americans were less inclined to appreciate their own modern novelists than the filigree meanderings of Proust — whom Sartre abhorred. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 551

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reverse culture shock dynamic in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the identity-politics dynamics of the immodesty article — foreigners’ affection for a culture can embarrass its own elites. — connects to: Existentialism’s critics rightly saw it could be misused as an excuse doctrine — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 651; Arendt worked to reattach existentialism to its German roots against American myth-making — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 554
• SEED: Angle: ‘When foreigners love your low culture more than you do’ — the recurring phenomenon where outsiders valorize what cultural insiders snub, from jazz and Faulkner to anime and SF.

Broader Connections

• Existentialism’s critics rightly saw it could be misused as an excuse doctrine #qualifies (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 651
• Arendt worked to reattach existentialism to its German roots against American myth-making #corroborates (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 554