Malcolm Cowley

Literary critic and editor, born in Belasco, Pennsylvania, USA. He interrupted his studies at Harvard to serve with the American Ambulance Corps in World War 1. Returning to France for graduate studies (1921–3), he met some of the American writers he would later feature in his first widely-known book, Exile's Return (1934). Working as a free-lance writer, he produced book reviews and critical essays, translated French works, and composed his own poetry. As associate editor of the New Republic (1929–44) he promoted contemporary American writers, and as literary adviser to Viking Press (1948–85) he edited popular editions of selected works of writers from Hawthorne and Whitman to F Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. It is generally recognized that his Viking Portable edition of William Faulkner (1946) was responsible for launching Faulkner's serious reputation. Cowley encouraged later generations of writers such as John Cheever, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey, and continued writing and lecturing to promote American literature until his final years.

Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.

Born at his parents' summer home outside of Belsano, Pennsylvania, in Cambria County, he grew up 70 miles to the west in Pittsburgh, where his father William was a homeopathic doctor.

He interrupted his undergraduate studies at Harvard University to join the American Field Service in France during World War I.

Upon returning to the US, Cowley married the artist Peggy Baird;

He graduated from Harvard in 1920. As part of the great migration of creative genius that congregated in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, Cowley returned to live in France for three years, working with Ernest Hemingway, F.

During this period, he became a radical Marxist and began writing about politics.

Later in life, Cowley edited the works of Hemingway, William Faulkner and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In fact, Cowley's introduction to The Portable Faulkner, is generally thought to have had a rejuvenating effect on Faulkner's reputation. Cowley's early 1960s introduction to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio is said, among Anderson scholars, to have had a similar effect.

Cowley's most famous work is his autobiographical Exile's Return, published in 1934.

Cowley died on March 27, 1989.