In the 1930s and 1940s, young book critics gathered outside the office of Malcolm Cowley, the magazine's literary editor. New Republichoping for his attention. Cowley, who established himself as a historian of a lost generation with Return of the Exile, a memoir of life in France with the then-unknown writers Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others, was undoubtedly one of the few American writers who shaped the tastes of the reading public. He could help a struggling writer keep the light on, or better yet, anoint him. Thus, the sad young men of letters and women whom he selected from the crowd were invited to join the ranks of the country's tastemakers.
Determining what the nation read and what it did not read was the main thrust of Cowley's career. He was a great discoverer and nurturer of talent: Jack Kerouac, John Cheever and Ken Kesey were among the writers he championed and the critics he commissioned to review New RepublicMany, including Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling and Muriel Rukeyser, went on to distinguished careers. By midlife, Cowley was respected as an editor and essayist, a deft translator of contemporary French literature, and a professor of creative writing at Stanford. He was also a cunning industry operator—a man who knew how to pit the various parts of the publishing machine against each other in the interests of the work he wanted to promote. His most remembered act may have been his attempt to revive the career of William Faulkner, who had faded into obscurity after World War II, by publishing an influential edition of his work by the Viking Press, but he also kept the fire burning for Walt Whitman, Nathaniel West, Sherwood Anderson and his close friend Hart Crane. (Broomthe short-lived magazine that Cowley helped edit published “Crane” along with such magazines as Gene Toomer, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens.)
In a 1963 issue of the magazine. EsqA scathing article entitled “The Structure of the Literary Establishment” said Cowley was close to the “hot seat” of power. New biography of Gerald Howard “The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature(Penguin Press) focuses on Cowley's place at this center, tracing his involvement in “almost everything and everyone of literary significance” during what we now call the American Century. Howard does more than highlight the ways in which—through recommending residency recipients, publishing essays and books, mentoring students, or reviving out-of-print works—Cowley shaped an individual literary career. Rather, as Howard, the former book editor himself sees it, Cowley's agitation for his country's literature also helped transform what was once considered a minor regional tradition into a world-historical one. Cowley's life story demonstrates not only how reputations are made (and destroyed), but also how “one determined actor” managed to bend an entire canon to “his tastes and beliefs.”
When Cowley was born at the end of the nineteenth century, American literature was considered by many to be a minor spectacle. Mark Twain may have been one of the most famous men of the century, but nonetheless the prevailing opinion was to regard his country's literature as “provincial, backward, lacking in artistic brilliance and value,” Howard writes. Anxiety about the country's cultural marginality was widespread. Analyzing American literary production over the last hundred or two years, one sees a fragmented corpus reflecting a nation more easily understood by region than as a whole.
In April 1917, while attending Harvard, Cowley traveled to Paris to volunteer for the war effort, following in the footsteps of his classmates John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. Working as a driver at the front, he was somewhat insulated from the horrors of the trench, but witnessed the carnage that a mortar shell could cause. His stay in France ended in the fall, and by November he returned to the States. After landing in New York, he decided to continue his “long journey” – away from school and aristocracy – to Greenwich Village. From this point on, he would be closely associated with the cultural life of the business bohemia, associating with people such as Eugene O'Neill and Dorothy Day. (He returned briefly to Harvard in 1919 and received his degree the following year.) Some of the most entertaining scenes of Howard's biography recount this tense period, when Cowley decided, somewhat unwisely, that the most direct route to influence was to review freelance books. He was constantly broke, and when he wasn't begging editors for reviews or pawning copies of reviews (and, in one terrible case, his Phi Beta Kappa ring), he sometimes worked as an extra in an O'Neill play. By age twenty, his byline appeared regularly in respected publications, and although much of this work was, in Howard's words, banal, the writers with whom he collaborated (including Katherine Mansfield, Amy Lowell, and Marcel Proust) give the impression of Cowley as a man caught between the magic of European modernism and the more down-to-earth American tradition.
From the beginning of his public life as an intellectual, Cowley was preoccupied with questions about what he called the “clusters” and “constellations” that distinguished one cohort from another, and how the disparate strands of American literature could be united into a recognizable movement. These concerns came to the fore in an essay he published in 1921, at the age of twenty-three, shortly after he won a scholarship to pursue graduate studies in France, where many of his peers had moved to escape the worsening national mood, the specters of Prohibition, and the Palmer Raids.
