Independent unaffiliated intellectuals wrote accessible prose for partisan journals in postwar America.

Evidence

Russell Jacoby’s widely read book, The Last Intellectuals (1987), argued that the conditions that produced an older generation of public intellectuals in the post-World War II era had been undermined and displaced in the 1980s. The unaffiliated intellectual functioning as a social critic writing accessible prose for such journals as The Partisan Review offers for Jacoby an ideal of what it means to mobilize a popular audience and a model for the role of a public intellectual. Inhabiting the bohemian enclaves of Greenwich Village, these intellectuals and the public spheres that support them have become an endangered species. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2621