The insider Malcolm Cowley and the triumph of American literature

When Malcolm Cowley rediscovered William Faulkner and rescued him from the remainder bin of history, he changed the face of modern American literature. Cowley may lack the name recognition of many of the authors he championed, but his instinct for recognizing lasting talent, from the Lost Generation to the proletarian writers of the Depression, from Kerouac to Cheever, helped inform the national cultural narrative. Howard, a distinguished former editor at Doubleday, presents a captivating life of Cowley that combines biography and cultural history and captures the pivotal role Cowley played in shaping twentieth-century American letters. Howard presents Cowley not merely as an observer of literary modernism but as a central player: a writer, editor, critic, and proselytizer whose assessments came to define the American canon. What emerges is a portrait of a man, deeply enmeshed in the currents of his time, who was sometimes controversial, often underestimated, and formidably influential. Written with clarity and affection, Howard's study balances personal detail with intellectual history while serving as both tribute and reevaluation, reaffirming Cowley's enduring significance as American literature's most savvy insider.

Former Doubleday executive editor Howard debuts with a thrilling biography of writer, editor, and literary critic Malcolm Cowley (1898--1989). Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Cowley graduated from Harvard before moving to Paris in the 1920s, where he fell in with the Lost Generation, an experience he later documented in his influential memoir Exile's Return. He spent much of the 1930s as the literary editor of the New Republic. Radicalized by the Great Depression, he became a prominent supporter of communism, which eventually cost him his editorship in 1941. Then in financial straits, he was given a lifeline by the Mellon Foundation in the form of a grant that enabled him to mount "one of the most important rescue missions in American literary history": a critical reassessment of the works of William Faulkner, who had fallen into near-obscurity by the mid-1940s. The project culminated in Viking's 1946 publication of The Portable Faulkner, a compendium edited and introduced by Cowley that repositioned Faulkner as a great American novelist on par with Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Faulkner went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1950.) Howard chronicles Cowley's many other literary contributions, including how he worked tirelessly to convince Viking to publish Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Deeply researched and thoroughly entertaining, this is a must-read for literature fans. (Nov.)

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'sOn the Road and Ken Kesey'sOne 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.