The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature

Former Doubleday executive editor Howard debuts with a thrilling biography of writer, editor, and literary critic Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989). Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Cowley graduated from Harvard before moving to Paris in the 1920s, where he fell in with the Lost Generation, an experience he later documented in his influential memoir Exile’s Return. He spent much of the 1930s as the literary editor of the New Republic. Radicalized by the Great Depression, he became a prominent supporter of communism, which eventually cost him his editorship in 1941. Then in financial straits, he was given a lifeline by the Mellon Foundation in the form of a grant that enabled him to mount “one of the most important rescue missions in American literary history”: a critical reassessment of the works of William Faulkner, who had fallen into near-obscurity by the mid-1940s. The project culminated in Viking’s 1946 publication of The Portable Faulkner, a compendium edited and introduced by Cowley that repositioned Faulkner as a great American novelist on par with Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Faulkner went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1950.) Howard chronicles Cowley’s many other literary contributions, including how he worked tirelessly to convince Viking to publish Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Deeply researched and thoroughly entertaining, this is a must-read for literature fans. (Nov.)