Malcolm Cowley
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Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.
Born at his parents' summer home outside of Belsano, Pennsylvania, in Cambria County, he grew up 70 miles to the west 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 interrupted his undergraduate studies at Harvard University 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 US, Cowley married the artist Peggy Baird; they were divorced in 1931. His second wife was Muriel Maurer.
He graduated from Harvard in 1920. 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. 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.
Later in life, Cowley edited the works of Hemingway, William Faulkner and Nathaniel Hawthornealso pushed for the publication of Jck Kerouac's On The Road as an editor for Viking press. In fact, Cowley's introduction to The Portable Faulkner, is generally thought to have had a rejuvenating effect on Faulkner's reputation. Cowley's early 1960s introduction to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio is said, among Anderson scholars, to have had a similar effect.
Cowley's most famous work is his autobiographical Exile's Return, published in 1934. Exile's Return particularly chronicles the general movement by the Lost Generation out of the United States.
Cowley died on March 27, 1989.
