Highbrow

The German physician, physiologist, and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) argued "for human diversity alonglines of racial differences as evidenced by skulls shapes and measurements.

[5] The term was popularized in 1902 by Will Irvin, a reporter for The Sun of New York City, who adhered to the phrenological notion of more intelligent people having high foreheads.

Usage of the term middlebrow is derogatory, as in Virginia Woolf's unsent letter to the New Statesman, written in the 1930s and published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942).

It is to be hoped that culture will soon be democratized through some less conventional system of education, giving rise to a new type that might be called the middle-brow, who will consider books as a source of intellectual enjoyment.In spite of their wide-reaching differences, Virginia Woolf describes the highbrow as intimately reliant on the lowbrow.

The three genres of fiction, as American readers approached them in the 1950s and as obscenity law differentially judged them, are the subject of Ruth Pirsig Wood, Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow Novels, 1995.