Malcolm Cowley

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Cowley, Malcolm (1898–1989), born in Pennsylvania, served in World War I, graduated from Harvard (1920), and later became an expatriate in France. Blue Juniata (1929) prints semi‐autobiographical poems tracing his mental and emotional development during this period, to his final facing of the American scene. A Dry Season (1942), further poems, is partly about the “lost generation.” Prose works, concerned with social and intellectual forces in contemporary society, include Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934; revised, 1951), partly autobiographical, analyzing the postwar generation; The Literary Situation (1954), about the sociology of contemporary American authorship; Think Back on Us (1967), collecting his writings during and on the 1930s; A Many‐Windowed House (1970), A Second Flowering (1973), and And I Worked at the Writer's Trade (1978), essays on modern American literature; The Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980), a memoir of the '30s, while The Flower and the Leaf (1985) recalls American writing since 1941 with some comment on famous early figures. His introduction to The Portable Faulkner (1946) marked the creation of Faulkner's reputation as a great writer. Much later he published Unshaken Friend (1985), a tribute to Thomas Wolfe's editor, Maxwell Perkins; and his Correspondence (of 1915–81) with Kenneth Burke (1988). He edited After the Genteel Tradition (1937) and many works by major American writers. The View from 80 (1981) contains reflections on the life of an octogenarian.

Malcolm Cowley , 1898–1989, American critic and poet, b. Belsano, Pa., grad. Harvard, 1920. He lived abroad in the 1920s and knew many writers of the "lost generation," about whom he wrote in Exile's Return (1934) and Second Flowering (1973). For many years he wrote a book-review column for the New Republic. His works include The Blue Juniata (1927) and A Dry Season (1942), poems; The Literary Situation (1954), a critical analysis; and Many Windowed Houses: Collected Essays on Writers and Writing (1970).