"The death of the 'public intellectual' has been announced more often than the death of the novel," a 2006 article in New York magazine claimed. Hollywood Intellect argues that the assumptions on which such laments rest result from misleading inattention to the intellectual work that mass culture performs. From D.W. Griffith's Intolerance to The Simpson's Movie, much of America's influential intellectual work has come out of Hollywood, which has long shaped America's intellectual agenda.