THE INSIDER

Agile life of a nearly forgotten writer and editor.

It’s meta to say here, but as Howard, a writer and editor, notes, there was a time in this country when literary criticism and book reviewing were taken seriously and exercised enormous influence over the culture. “Critics enjoyed prestige and sway over not just educated, but even mass opinion,” acting as guides and gatekeepers to the flood of cultural production following World War II. Enter Malcolm Cowley, a farm-born Pennsylvanian and later resident of New York and Paris, one of the post–World War I expatriate Americans. Cowley, according to Howard’s fluent, fast-moving narrative, wrote mountains of reviews and many books, and he knew everyone and championed the writers whom he admired, not least of them Ernest Hemingway, who was also living in Paris and was all but unknown, and William Faulkner, who had been all but forgotten; Cowley’s advocacy, Howard suggests, was directly instrumental in Faulkner being awarded the Nobel Prize. Cowley was adept at the politics of culture and publishing: “His career is a master class in how the literary Game of Thrones was played in the twentieth century, and, to a certain extent, to this day.” But he was also deeply generous and of unfailing good taste, discovering and publishing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, among many other books and writers. Howard does a fine job of placing Cowley in the cultural context of his long career—he lived to be 90 and wrote almost to the end—which includes nearly being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, having been a leftist in his early years and a liberal after. John Updike’s encomium on Cowley’s death says much: “He was an energetic and gregarious man who lived the life of the mind with gusto and good nature.”

A superb contribution to the history of American literature and the Lost Generation.