Brow placement ...

... "That excellent American critic, Van Wyck Brooks, writing as a young man just as the European War (as it was then) had broken out, introduced into an essay, to deplore them, those brand-new slang terms 'Highbrow' and 'Lowbrow'. (He was wise enough, even then, to realise that the common use of these terms, dividing people into two opposed classes and somehow disliking both of them, would do far more harm than good. It has in fact done literature a disservice.)

- J.B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man

Priestley's book came out in 1960 and Brooks had made his point more than 40 years before that. But the terms he deplored are still with us, along with 'Middlebrow', which seems to have for some a term of special opprobrium. I suppose Somerset Maugham - one of my favorite writers, I confess - would be an example of a middlebrow author. So this, from W.H. Auden's review of Maugham's A Writer's Notebook, seems pertinent:

"We shall miss you. Of course we shall find new writers to read, but art, like friendship, is personal, that is, unique, and no writer is replaceable by or even comparable with another. Thank you for having given us so much pleasure for so long, for having never been tedious" ...

The Auden review is among much to read, all of it with pleasure, in The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose: Volume III 1949-1955 (Princeton University Press).