Malcolm Cowley

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Malcolm Cowley (August 24, 1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American writer, editor, historian, writer, and literary critic.

He is best known for his first book of poetry, Blue Juniata (1929), his lyrical memoir, Exile's Return (1934), rev.

(51), as a chronicler and fellow traveler of the Lost Generation, as well as an influential editor and talent scout at Viking Press, 1951.

Early life

Cowley was born in Belsano, Pennsylvania, on August 24, 1898, to William Cowley and Josephine Hutmacher. He grew up in Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood, where his father, William, was a homeopathic physician. Cowley attended Shakespeare Street elementary school and graduated from Peabody High School, where his boyhood friend Kenneth Burke was also a student. Cowley's first published writing appeared in his high school newspaper.

He attended Harvard University, but his studies were interrupted when he joined the American Field Service during World War II to drive ambulances and munitions trucks for the French army. In 1919, he returned to Harvard and became editor of The Harvard Advocate, which became The Harvard Advocate. He received a B.A. In 1920, a newspaper in Belgium was published.

Life in Paris

Cowley was one of the many literary and artistic figures who immigrated to Paris in the 1920s. As he often spent time with writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell, and others associated with American literary modernism, he became one of Europe's best-known chroniclers. Cowley called these Americans who migrated overseas during the war period as a "wandering, landless, uprooted generation," and Hemingway, who claimed to have borrowed the term from Gertrude Stein, described them as the "lost generation." Cowley's admiration for artistic liberty was greatly affected by this sense of uprootedness. "Our whole program was involuntarily directed toward destroying whatever roots we had in the soil, toward eradicating our local and regional peculiarities, leading to World War I." Cowley wrote about his experience in Exile's Return, "our entire education was in the process of transforming us homeless citizens of the world."

Though Cowley collaborated with several American writers in Europe, the admiration was not always reciprocal. In a later iteration of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway deleted direct reference to Cowley, adding the phrase "that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a dismissive glance at his potato face discussing the Dada movement." The contempt he had for Cowley was revealed by John Dos Passos' private correspondence, but care writers had to mask their personal feelings in order to secure their careers after Cowley became The New Republic's editor. Nonetheless, Exile's Return was one of the first autobiographical books to ground the American expatriate experience. Despite not doing well during its first issue, Cowley quickly established itself as one of the Lost Generation's most trenchant emissaries. Exile's Return was described as "an irreplaceable literary record of the most dramatic period in American literature history," literary scholar Van Wyck Brooks characterized it.

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Early career and involvement in politics

Cowley spent time in Paris and developed his relationship with Dada's avant-garde sensibilities, as well as Marxism and its attempts to destabilize the socioeconomic and political conditions that had thrown Europe into a devastating war. He moved between Paris and Greenwich Village in New York, and the United States Communist Party came into close proximity through these intersecting social circles, although he never officially joined. Cowley's ostensibly communist column The New Republic, a left-leaning publication, moved to a "resolutely communist direction" in 1929. Maurice Barrès's book "La Colline Inspirée" was translated and published a foreword. Cowley became more involved in radical politics in the early 1930s. Edmund Wilson, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Waldo Frank became union-sponsored observers of the miners' strikes in Kentucky in 1932. The mines' owners threatened their lives, and Frank was badly wounded. When Exile's Return first appeared in 1934, it presented a distinctly Marxist interpretation of history and social conflict.

Cowley was one of the founding of The League of American Writers in 1935. Archibald MacLeish, Upton Sinclair, Clifford Odets, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Peter Sandburg, Waldo Frank, David Ogden Stewart, John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett were among the notable contributors. Cowley was elected Vice President in the United States and became active in a number of campaigns, including attempts to convince the US government to help the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He resigned in 1940 due to complaints that the company was too heavily influenced by the Communist Party.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Archibald MacLeish, Cowley's associate, poet, and "popular front" interventionist in 1941, just ahead of the Office of War Information. Cowley was hired as an analyst by MacLeish. Whittaker Chambers and Westbrook Pegler, among other anti-commonist journalists, condemned Cowley's left-wing sympathies openly. Cowley was soon discovered in the crosshairs of congressman Martin Dies (D-Texas), who was a Texas congressman. The House Un-American Activities Committee and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Cowley was accused of being a member of seventy-two communist or communist-front organisations, according to Dies. This number was certainly exaggeration, but Cowley had no reason to deny it. J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigations pressured MacLeish soon to dismiss Cowley. MacLeish replied in January 1942 that the FBI needs a course of instruction in history. "Don't you agree it would be a good thing if all investigators understood that liberalism is not a murder but rather the president of the United States and the greater part of his administration?" "I said, he was sober." Cowley resigned two months later, having promised never to write about politics again.

Editorial career and academia

Cowley began a career as a literary consultant, editor, and talent scout at Viking Press in 1944, having been more or less silenced politically. He was hired to serve on As You Were: A Portable Library of American Prose and Poetry Assembled for Members of the Armed Forces and Merchant Marines. The Portable Library was an anthology of paperback reprints that could be mass-produced inexpensively and sold to military forces at its inception. It also emphasized an American literary tradition that could be characterized as patriotic during wartime. Yet Cowley was able to steer the story toward those that were, in his esteem, underappreciated writers.

He first started to edit The Portable Hemingway (1944). Hemingway was primarily perceived as a sparse and simplistic writer at the time. Cowley's introduction essay deviated from this belief, implying that Hemingway can be read as tortured and subpoena. The current critical view remains that this revaluation is the most prevalent viewpoint. Hemingway's tip-of-the-iceberg style has been one of twentieth-century American prose's most imitated, according to literary commentator Mark McGurl, "the value of craft as shown by multiple revisions" and "the authenticity of craft as represented by the use of multiple revision.

Cowley was able to convince Viking to produce a Portable Faulkner in 1946 because the Portable Hemingway was so popular. William Faulkner was, at the time, disappearing into literary obscurity. He was already working as a Hollywood screenwriter and was in danger of having his books go out of print by the 1930s. Cowley pressed for a dramatic revaluation of Faulkner's fame in American letters, enlisting him as an honorary member of the Lost Generation. Many scholars see Cowley's essay as having resuscitated Faulkner's career, according to Robert Penn Warren. In 1949, Faulkner received the Nobel Prize. "I owe Malcolm Cowley the kind of loan no man could ever repay," he said.

In 1951, Cowley produced a revised Exile's Return. "The revisions downplayed some of the more overtly Marxist tenets', and eventually emphasized the return of exile as a vital step toward re-uniting a nation's unity": "the old pattern of alienation and reintegration, or departure and return, is repeated in scores of European myths and has continually embodied in life." Cowley wrote. This time, the book was much better. Cowley also published a Portable Hawthorne (1948), The Literary Tradition (1954), and edited a new edition of Leaves of Grass (1959), by Walt Whitman. These were followed by Black Cargoes, A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1962), Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age (1966), Think Back on Us (1967), Lesson of the Masters (1971) and A Second Flowering (1973).

Cowley began teaching creative writing at the college level in the 1950s. Larry McMurtry, Peter S. Beagle, Wendell Berry, as well as Ken Kesey, whose One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) Cowley contributed to Viking's publication. Writing workshops were a new development at the time (the Iowa Writers' Workshop was established in 1936), but by midcentury, writers and publishers' circulation was on the decline. Cowley worked at Yale, Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, California, Irvine, California, and even the prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, but he never had a full-time teaching position. According to literary and cultural critic Benjamin Kirbach, this back-and-forth between universities and publishing industry enabled Cowley to reconcile his cosmopolitan ideal within the academy's boundaries. "Cowley's itinerancy—his apparent movement between universities and the publishing industry, both individual and collective, played a key role in institutionalizing [literary] modernism" in the twentieth century, according to Kirbach.

He was a contributing editor to Viking Press and lobbied for the release of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Cowley's monographizing 28 Fitzgerald short stories and editing a reissue of Tender Is the Night, both in 1951, were vital to Fitzgerald's success, as well as his introduction to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which was written in the early 1960s. Eight More Harvard Poets (1923), A Second Flowering: A History of the Lost Generation (1973), and The Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980): Reflections of the 1930s (1980).

In 1990, the year after Cowley's death, Michael Rogers wrote in Library Journal: "Though the late Cowley is one of the unknown heroes of twentieth-century American literature," he wrote. Poet, a critic, Boswell of the Lost Generation, of which he was a member, savior of Faulkner's dwindling fame, editor of Kerouac's On the Road, John Cheever, Cowley knew everyone and wrote a critical article about them. . a.k.a. .. . Cowley's essays on the great books are equally as important as the books themselves. . Is it true? ... All American literature collections should have this book."

Cowley was still a hero in the world of letters, to the end. "I'm almost getting pathologically tenderhearted," Louise Bogan wrote in 1941. I have been given so much pain by writers and political allrightniks of all sorts of belief that I don't want to cause pain to anyone."

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