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.

Cowley was born August 24, 1898, in Belsano, Pennsylvania, to William Cowley and Josephine Hutmacher. Starting at age nine, he grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where his father, William, was a homeopathic doctor. Cowley attended the Shakespeare School and Peabody High School, where his boyhood friend Kenneth Burke was also a student. Cowley participated in Peabody's debate club and wrote poetry for its literary magazine, recognized with coverage in local newspapers like The Pittsburgh Post. Cowley graduated from Peabody in 1915, second in his class, and aided by a scholarship from the local Harvard Club, Cowley was accepted to Harvard College with enough credits to skip the introductory English classes.

Being on scholarship and matriculating from a public school put Cowley at a social disadvantage compared to wealthier students, wrote Gerald Howard in a 2025 biography of Cowley: "The more prosperous and socially advantaged Harvard students could...slide through their college life on charm and connections and 'gentleman's C's' or worse. But Cowley would need to be a scholarship boy during his years at Harvard to afford the tuition, which meant he had to apply himself academically and keep his grades high enough to renew his scholarship annually."

His studies at Harvard were interrupted when he joined the American Field Service during World War I to drive ambulances 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.

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. However, wrote Howard in 2025: "...his consistent admiration for traditional literary forms, for the practice of writing as an honest craft...and for literature as a richly human activity ran counter to the ideas that governed the literary avant-garde during the early years of the Modernist expansion."

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".

While Cowley associated with many American writers in Europe, the sense of admiration was not always mutual. Hemingway removed direct reference to Cowley in a later version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, replacing his name with the description, "that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement". John Dos Passos's private correspondence revealed the contempt he held for Cowley, but also the care writers took to hide their personal feelings in order to protect their careers once Cowley had become an editor of The New Republic. Regardless, Exile's Return was one of the first autobiographical texts to foreground the American expatriate experience. Despite not selling well during its first publication, it established Cowley as one of the most trenchant emissaries of the Lost Generation. Literary historian Van Wyck Brooks described Exile's Return as "an irreplaceable literary record of the most dramatic period in American literary history."^{[citation needed]}

While in Paris, Cowley found himself drawn to the avant-garde sensibilities of Dada, and also, like many other intellectuals of the period, to Marxism. He travelled frequently between Paris and Greenwich Village in New York. Through these intersecting social circles came into close proximity, though he never officially joined, with the Communist Party USA. Cowley believed that the Communist Party was hostile to intellectuals and: "Nobody actually a Communist seemed to write good English prose."