Malcolm Cowley (August 28, 1898 Belsano, Cambria County, Pennsylvania – March 27, 1989) was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.
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Born August 28, 1898 in Western Pennsylvania, Cowley grew up in Pittsburgh, where his father William was a homeopathic doctor. He graduated from Peabody High School where his friend Kenneth Burke was also a student. He obtained a B.A. from Harvard University in 1920.
He interrupted his undergraduate studies to join the American Field Service in France during World War I. From the Western Front he reported on the war for The Pittsburgh Gazette (today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).
Upon returning to the USA, Cowley married the artist Peggy Baird; they were divorced in 1931. His second wife was Muriel Maurer. Together they had one son, Robert William Cowley, who is an editor and military historian.
As part of the great crowd of creative genius that migrated to Paris, France, and congregated in Montparnasse, Cowley returned to live in France for three years, where he worked with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell, Harry Crosby, and others. For this reason, he is often seen as a key part of America's Lost Generation. Despite his acquaintance with Hemingway, Dos Passos and others, it is not altogether clear that their relations were amicable. Hemingway famously removed direct reference to Cowley in his later version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, replacing his name with the description, "that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement".[1] John Dos Passos's private correspondence revealed the contempt he held for Cowley, but also the care writers took to hide their personal feelings in order to protect their own careers when Cowley became assistant editor of The New Republic.[2] From his couple decades of struggling in deep poverty, he (along with Wilson) ultimately became the most prolific chronicler of that fruitful expatriate generation.[citation needed]
Among his many works perhaps the most famous are his early book of poetry "Blue Juniata" (1929), encouraged by Hart Crane, and his early autobiographical "Exile's Return," published in 1934. The latter is one of the first about the general movement of the Lost Generation out of the United States, and was reissued in a less radical edition with new material, also, like his Fitzgerald revivals, in 1951. Noted American literary historian Van Wyck Brooks described it as "an irreplaceable literary record of the most dramatic period in American literary history."
Reviewing books during his college days (at $1 per), editing and contributing to ephemeral little journals, Cowley's most notable direct impact on young writers probably ran from 1929 through 1944, when he was an assistant editor of The New Republic. During this period, as with many American writers and artists, he became a radical Marxist and began writing about politics in addition to his many literary productions. And, like the many of his generation, Cowley came under scrutiny by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI.
As an editorial consultant to Viking Press, he pushed for the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. In 1946 Cowley's introduction to Viking's The Portable Faulkner, a collection which he also edited, is generally considered a turning point in William Faulkner's reputation in the United States at a time when many of his early works were in danger of going out of print. Cowley's work anthologizing 28 Fitzgerald short stories and editing a reissue of "Tender is the Night," restructured based on Fitzgerald's notes, both in 1951, were key to reviving Fitzgerald's reputation as well, and his introduction to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, written in the early 1960s, is said to have had a similar effect on Anderson's reputation. Other Works of literary-critical importance include "Eight More Harvard Poets" (1923), "A Second Flowering: Works & Days of the Lost Generation" (1973), "And I Worked at the Writer's Trade" (1978), and "The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s" (1980).
When "The Portable Malcolm Cowley" (Donald Faulkner editor) came out in 1990, the year after the author's death, Michael Rogers wrote in "Library Journal": "Though a respected name in hardcore literary circles, in general the late Cowley is one of the unsung heroes of 20th-century American literature. Poet, critic, Boswell of the Lost Generation of which he himself was a member, savior of Faulkner's dwindling reputation, editor of Kerouac's On the Road, discoverer of John Cheever, Cowley knew everybody and wrote about them with sharp insight. . . . . Cowley's writings on the great books are as important as the books themselves . . . . All American literature collections should own this."
To the end, Cowley remained one of the great humanitarians in the world of letters: To writer Louise Brogan he wrote in 1941, "I'm almost getting pathologically tender-hearted. I have been caused so much pain by reviewers and political allrightniks of several shades of opinion that I don't want to cause pain to anybody."1 He remained virulently devoted to Hemingway as one of the great artists of all time, even while his stock was long dropping by the time of Cowley's death; and all of his works, in prose of notable clarity, redound with intelligent consideration and insightful treatment of the many writers and artists his voluminous chronicles include.
1) Letter to poet/novelist Louise Bogan, Swann Auction Galleries, Sale 2157: Modern Literature Featuring Americans in Paris. New York, October 16, 2008; private collection.
   | Malcom Cowley's Childhood Home - Cowley House at White Mill, Belsano |
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