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Malcolm Cowley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Malcolm Cowley (August 28, 1898, Belsano, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, USA – March 27, 1989.) was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.
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.
As part of the great migration of creative genius that congregated in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, Cowley returned to live in France for three years, working with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. For this reason, he is often referred to as being part of the Lost Generation. His most famous work is his autobiographical Exile's Return, published in 1934 and chronicling the general movement by the Lost Generation out of the United States.
From 1929 through 1944, Cowley was an assistant editor of The New Republic. During this period, he became a radical Marxist and began writing about politics. As with many of his generation, Cowley came under scrutiny by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI.
As an editor for the 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 Faulkner's reputation in the United States, at time when many of the author's early works were in danger of falling out of print. Cowley's introduction to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, written in the early 1960s, is said to have had a similar effect on Anderson's reputation.