30 Facts About Malcolm Cowley

Malcolm Cowley was an American writer, editor, historian, poet, and literary critic.

Malcolm Cowley grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where his father, William, was a homeopathic doctor.

Malcolm Cowley attended Shakespeare Street elementary school and in 1915 graduated from Peabody High School, where his boyhood friend Kenneth Burke was a student.

Malcolm Cowley's first published writing appeared in his high school newspaper.

Malcolm Cowley attended Harvard University, but his studies were interrupted when he joined the American Field Service during World War I to drive ambulances and munitions trucks for the French army.

Malcolm Cowley returned to Harvard in 1919 and became editor of The Harvard Advocate.

Malcolm Cowley was one of the many literary and artistic figures who migrated to Paris in the 1920s.

In Blue Juniata, Malcolm Cowley described these Americans who travelled abroad during the postwar period as a "wandering, landless, uprooted generation"; similarly Hemingway, claiming to have taken the phrase from Gertrude Stein, called them the "lost generation".

Malcolm Cowley travelled frequently between Paris and Greenwich Village in New York, and through these intersecting social circles came into close proximity, though he never officially joined, with the US Communist Party.

In 1935, Malcolm Cowley helped to establish a leftist collective, The League of American Writers.

Malcolm Cowley was appointed Vice President, and over the next few years became involved in numerous campaigns, including attempts to persuade the United States government to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.

Malcolm Cowley resigned in 1940, owing to concerns that the organization was too heavily influenced by the Communist Party.

Nevertheless, Malcolm Cowley resigned two months later, vowing to never write about politics again.

In 1944, having been more or less silenced politically, Malcolm Cowley began a career as a literary advisor, editor, and talent scout at Viking Press.

Malcolm Cowley was hired to work on the Portable Library series, which had started in 1943 with As You Were: A Portable Library of American Prose and Poetry Assembled for Members of the Armed Forces and Merchant Marine.

Yet Malcolm Cowley was able to steer the series toward what were, in his esteem, underappreciated writers.

Malcolm Cowley first set out to edit The Portable Hemingway.

Malcolm Cowley departed from this perception in his introductory essay, claiming instead that Hemingway could be read as tortured and submerged.

The Portable Hemingway sold so well that Malcolm Cowley was able to convince Viking to publish a Portable Faulkner in 1946.

Malcolm Cowley again argued for a dramatic revaluation of Faulkner's position in American letters, enlisting him as an honorary member of the Lost Generation.

Malcolm Cowley later said, "I owe Malcolm Cowley the kind of debt no man could ever repay".

Malcolm Cowley then published a revised edition of Exile's Return in 1951.

Malcolm Cowley published a Portable Hawthorne, The Literary Tradition, and edited a new edition of Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman.

Malcolm Cowley taught creative writing at the college-level beginning in the 1950s.

Malcolm Cowley taught at Yale, Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, California at Irvine and Berkeley, and even the prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, among other places, but he seldom maintained a full-time teaching appointment.

Literary and cultural critic Benjamin Kirbach argues that this flitting back-and-forth between universities and the publishing industry allowed Malcolm Cowley to reconcile his cosmopolitan ideal within the constraints of the academy.

Poet, critic, Boswell of the Lost Generation of which he himself was a member, savior of Faulkner's dwindling reputation, editor of Kerouac's On the Road, discoverer of John Cheever, Malcolm Cowley knew everybody and wrote about them with sharp insight.

Malcolm Cowley married artist Peggy Baird; they were divorced in 1931.

Together they had one son, Robert William Malcolm Cowley, who is an editor and military historian.

Malcolm Cowley died of a heart attack March 27,1989.