Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was an American writer, critic, philosopher, and activist. Macdonald was a member of the New York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist magazine Partisan Review for six years. He also contributed to other New York publications including Time, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Politics, a journal which he founded in 1944.

Macdonald was born on the Upper West Side of New York City to Dwight Macdonald Sr. (–1926) and Alice Hedges Macdonald (–1957), a prosperous Protestant family from Brooklyn. Macdonald was educated at the Barnard School, Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale. At university, he was editor of The Yale Record, the student humor magazine. As a student at Yale, he also was a member of Psi Upsilon and his first job was as a trainee executive for Macy's.

In 1929, Macdonald was employed at Time magazine; he had been offered a job by Henry Luce, a fellow Yale alumnus. In 1930, he became the associate editor of Fortune, then a new publication created by Luce. Like many writers on Fortune, his politics were radicalized by the Great Depression. He resigned from the magazine in 1936 over an editorial dispute, when the magazine's executives severely edited the last installment of his extended four-part attack on U.S. Steel.

In 1934, he married Nancy Gardiner Rodman (1910–1996), sister of Selden Rodman and credited as the person who "radicalized" him. He is the father of filmmaker and author Nicholas Macdonald and of Michael Macdonald.

Macdonald was an editor of the Partisan Review magazine from 1937 to 1943, but in the course of editorial disagreements about the degree, the practice, and the principles of political, cultural, and literary criticism, he quit to establish Politics, a magazine of more outspoken and leftist editorial perspective which he published from 1944 to 1949.

As an editor, he fostered intellectuals (academic and public), such as Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Bruno Bettelheim, and C. Wright Mills. Besides his editorial work, he also was a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, from 1952 to 1962 and was the movie critic for Esquire magazine. In the 1960s, the quality of his movie-review work for Esquire granted Macdonald public exposure in the American cultural mainstream as a movie reviewer for The Today Show, a daytime television talk-show program.

Macdonald was for a period an organized Trotskyist in the Socialist Workers Party. He was part of an opposition grouping to Leon Trotsky which culminated in a split in 1940. His split with Trotskyism, including over the Kronstadt rebellion and the defense of the foundations of the Soviet Union, was part of a generalized break with Marxism.

Macdonald then moved towards democratic socialism. He was opposed to totalitarianism, including fascism and Bolshevism, whose defeat he viewed as necessary to the survival of civilization. He denounced Joseph Stalin for first encouraging the Poles to launch an anti-Nazi insurrection — the Warsaw Uprising (August–October 1944) — and then halting the Red Army at the outskirts of Warsaw to allow the German Army to crush the Poles and kill their leaders, communist and noncommunist.