Malcolm Cowley

Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) was an American novelist, poet, and literary critic who, along with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Edmund Wilson, shaped the artistic sensibilities of America’s Lost Generation. After covering the World War I Western Front for The Pittsburgh Gazette, Cowley joined other expatriate authors in Paris and later became an important chronicler of that artistic collective. As an editor for Viking Press and, later, The New Republic, Cowley promoted and edited works by Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Jack Kerouac. Cowley’s own works included the influential collection of poetry, Blue Juniata (1929), Exile’s Return (1934), perhaps the most complete examination of his Lost Generation literary contemporaries, and the autobiographical And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade, winner of a 1980 American Book Award. Cowley edited many of the most distinguished author collections in Viking’s Portable series, and was honored, postmortem, with his own collection, The Portable Malcolm Cowley (1990), edited by Donald Faulkner.