What Is A Highbrow?

“Harper’s Magazine examined the three categories at mid-century. ‘What is a highbrow?’ the writer asked, followed by three replies. ‘A highbrow is a man who has found something more interesting than women,’ Edgar Wallace, a writer of crime novels and thrillers once said. Harper’s writer thought that too vague, but that Columbia professor and author Brander Matthews came closer with ‘a highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence,’ and that perhaps humorist and playwright A.P. Herbert came closest with ‘a highbrow is the kind of person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.” (William Romanowski, Pop Culture Wars, p. 58).