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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". 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." Early career and involvement in politics 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 and its attempts to demystify the socioeconomic and political conditions that had plunged Europe into a devastating war. He 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 U.S. Communist Party. In 1929, Cowley became an associate editor of the left-leaning magazine The New Republic, which he steered in "a resolutely communist direction" The same year, he translated and wrote a foreword to the 1913 French novel 'La Colline Inspirée', by Maurice Barrès. By the early 1930s, Cowley became increasingly involved in radical politics. In 1932, he joined Edmund Wilson, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Waldo Frank as union-sponsored observers of the miners' strikes in Kentucky. Their lives were threatened by the mines' owners, and Frank was badly beaten. When Exile's Return was first published in 1934, it put forth a distinctly Marxist interpretation of history and social struggle. In 1935, Cowley helped to establish a leftist collective, The League of American Writers. Other notable members included Archibald MacLeish, Upton Sinclair, Clifford Odets, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Carl Van Doren, Waldo Frank, David Ogden Stewart, John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett. 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. He resigned in 1940, owing to concerns that the organization was too heavily influenced by the Communist Party. In 1941, near the outset of the United States' involvement in World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Cowley's associate, poet and "popular front" interventionist Archibald MacLeish, as head of the War Department's Office of Facts and Figures (precursor to the Office of War Information). MacLeish recruited Cowley as an analyst. This decision resulted in anti-communist journalists such as Whittaker Chambers and Westbrook Pegler publicly exposing Cowley's left-wing sympathies. Cowley soon found himself in the crosshairs of congressman Martin Dies (D-Tex.) and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Dies accused Cowley of belonging to seventy-two communist or communist-front organizations. This number was certainly an exaggeration, but Cowley had no recourse to deny it. MacLeish soon came under pressure from J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to dismiss Cowley. In January 1942, MacLeish sent his reply that the FBI needed a course of instruction in history. "Don't you think it would be a good thing if all investigators could be made to understand that Liberalism is not only not a crime but actually the attitude of the President of the United States and the greater part of his Administration?", he said. Nevertheless, Cowley resigned two months later, vowing to never write about politics again. Editorial career and academia In 1944, having been more or less silenced politically, Cowley began a career as a literary advisor, editor, and talent scout at Viking Press. He 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. In its inception, the Portable Library was an anthology of paper.... Discover the Walt Whitman Malcolm Cowley popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Walt Whitman Malcolm Cowley books.