Cowley, Malcolm

Malcolm Cowley, (born August 24, 1898, Belsano, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died March 27, 1989, New Milford, Connecticut), American literary critic and social historian who chronicled the writers of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s and their successors. As literary editor of The New Republic from 1929 to 1944, with a generally leftist position on cultural questions, he played a significant part in many of the literary and political battles of the Great Depression years.

Cowley grew up in Pittsburgh. His education at Harvard was interrupted during World War I when he joined the American Field Service as an ambulance driver in France and attended for a brief period a U.S. Army artillery officers’ training school. He graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1920, took advanced study in France at the University of Montpellier (1922), and helped to put out the expatriate little magazines Secession and Broom. In this role, he came to know the European and particularly the Parisian avant-garde. (The two magazines were quartered in various European cities, and each had for a time as associate editor the American biographer Matthew Josephson.) Cowley returned to the United States in 1923 and for the next five years supported himself by freelance writing and translating; he eventually settled in Sherman, Connecticut. His Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934; rev. ed. published 1951 under the subtitle A Literary Odyssey of the 1920’s) is an important social and literary history of the expatriate American writers of the 1920s. In it he signaled the importance of their rediscovery of America as a source for literature. Cowley revived the literary reputation of William Faulkner with his editing of the anthology The Portable Faulkner (1946).

Among Cowley’s other works are The Literary Situation (1954), a study of the role of the American writer in his society, and the collections of criticism and comment Think Back on Us (1967) and A Many-Windowed House (1970). The correspondence he exchanged with Faulkner appeared in 1966 in The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944–1962. Among the many books he edited are After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers Since 1910 (1937, reprinted 1964) and Books That Changed Our Minds (1939). And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade (1978) combines literary history and autobiography. In 1980 he published the well-received The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s, a social and cultural history of the Great Depression and the New Deal. In that year, too, he released The View from 80, an absorbing, honest essay on old age, expanded from an earlier magazine article.