Malcolm Cowley

Malcolm Cowley (August 24, 1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American writer, editor, historian, poet, and literary critic. His best known works include his first book of poetry, Blue Juniata (1929), and his memoir, Exile's Return (1934; rev. 1951), written as a chronicler and fellow traveller of the Lost Generation and an influential editor and talent scout at Viking Press. Early life Cowley was born August 24, 1898, in Belsano, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, to William Cowley and Josephine Hutmacher. He grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where his father, William, was a homeopathic doctor. Cowley attended Shakespeare Street elementary school and in 1915 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 I to drive ambulances and munitions trucks for the French army. He returned to Harvard in 1919 and became editor of The Harvard Advocate. He graduated with a B.A. in 1920. Life in Paris Cowley was one of the many literary and artistic figures who migrated to Paris in the 1920s. He became one of the best-known chroniclers of the American expatriates in Europe, as he frequently spent time with writers like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell, and others associated with American literary modernism. In Blue Juniata, 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". This sense of uprootedness deeply affected Cowley's appreciation for the necessities of artistic freedom. It moreover informed his ideal of cosmopolitanism in contrast to the fervent nationalism(s) that had led to World War I. Cowley recounted his experiences in Exile's Return, writing, "our whole training was involuntarily directed toward destroying whatever roots we had in the soil, toward eradicating our local and regional peculiarities, toward making us homeless citizens of the world".