Gertrude Stein knew a good phrase when she heard one. Shortly after World War I she stopped at a garage in a small town in France to have her Ford Model T repaired. When the work was done and she praised the young mechanic, the garage owner growled that he had trained him, but that men between twenty-two and thirty who had served in the war were hopeless; they were “une génération perdue.”

She told the story to Ernest Hemingway, who used “You are all a lost generation”—attributed to Stein—as one of the epigraphs to his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), about a group of friends who suffer from postwar anomie and anxiety. Suddenly the “lost generation” was a thing, though according to Gerald Howard’s The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, it was Cowley’s memoir Exile’s Return (1934) that

set forth the durable template of revolt and reintegration of the artistic Americans who flocked to the Left Bank in the twenties to escape their country’s cultural limitations, only to rediscover the virtues of the country they’d fled.

Who exactly was Malcolm Cowley? When Howard, a longtime editor at Doubleday, mentioned the subject of his book to friends, they inevitably replied, Malcolm Lowry? But Cowley was a consummate literary insider—hence Howard’s title—who knew, reviewed, advocated for, argued with, or memorialized most of the twentieth-century authors “of literary consequence.” And with his “heroic, ceaseless activity on behalf of American writers and writing,” Howard claims, Cowley “enabled a true hinge moment in the history of American literature,” placing it “among the great literatures of the world.” That’s the “triumph” in the subtitle of Howard’s largely hagiographic book.

At the same time Howard contends that because of Cowley’s close association with the Stalinist left, he was “a convenient political punching bag for neoconservative critics” who attacked him so viciously that they doubtless contributed to his eclipse. And though he says he will not airbrush Cowley’s poor political choices, Howard is clearly nettled by the reviews of Cowley’s selected letters, published in 2014, that appeared under such titles as “Malcolm Cowley Was One of the Best Literary Tastemakers of the Twentieth Century. Why Were His Politics So Awful?” Howard observes that “to excoriate Cowley so single-mindedly is to indulge in a tired, over-repeated trope.”

Fortunately for Cowley, though, his politics aren’t remembered any more than his output as a reviewer, which was vast. During the 1920s he wrote reviews and short essays for a number of New York newspapers and for a host of small literary magazines in which he also published his poetry. By the age of thirty-six, when he published Exile’s Return, he was the literary editor of The New Republic. In the next decade he edited three anthologies—ThePortable Hemingway (1944), ThePortable Faulkner (1946), and The Portable Hawthorne (1948)—and his introduction to the Faulkner volume reestablished the importance of the brilliant, inventive, haunted, but at the time virtually forgotten novelist. It was “a masterpiece of critical advocacy and explication, flowing, detailed, persuasive,” Howard rightly declares.

Born in 1898 in Belsano, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh), Cowley went to Harvard in 1915. Howard lists distinguished graduates, only some of whom Cowley knew:

Eliot (’09), swashbuckling journalist John Reed (’10), political pundit and philosopher Walter Lippmann (’09), poets Conrad Aiken (’12) and E.E. Cummings (’15), the critic Van Wyck Brooks (’08), the legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins (’07), novelist John Dos Passos (’14), and the humorist Robert Benchley (’12).

While at Harvard, Cowley attended the salon of the poet Amy Lowell, whose brother was the president of the university and who admired Henry James (“not a graduate but extremely Harvard-adjacent”). And though he may have considered himself an outsider at Harvard, Cowley assumed the prejudices of “the ruling clique”—in particular, its antisemitism, which he outgrew. “In the future a number of his closest friends would be Jewish,” Howard writes in dead seriousness, “and he would be employed by a publishing firm, Viking, all of whose principals were Jewish.”

Though the US did not enter World War I until April 1917, Harvard students and graduates were already volunteering as noncombatants. Dos Passos and Cummings signed up for the Norton–Harjes Ambulance Corps, established by Richard Norton (’92), the son of the Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, Howard notes, while Cowley enlisted for a six-month tour in 1917 with the American Field Service (founded by a Harvard economist).

Though planning to return to Harvard afterward to continue his studies, once the US declared war Cowley briefly attended an officers’ training school in Kentucky and then lived in New York City. He married the women’s rights activist Peggy Baird, who helped him find work as a book reviewer, first for The Dial,where he became a regular contributor. Introducing himself as one of “the youngest generation of critics” to Brooks, The Freeman’s literary editor, and with references from Dos Passos and Harold Stearns, he was soon reviewing books in its pages and writing for the New York Herald Tribune and TheLiterary Review of the New York Evening Post as well. He also took a full-time copyediting job, and finally, after going back to Cambridge and with the help of one of his Harvard mentors, he received an American Field Service fellowship for graduate study at the University of Montpellier, in the South of France. Off the young couple went in 1921.

Cowley was already writing about his peers: his influential essay “This Youngest Generation” (1921) was possibly a response to Randolph Bourne’s eloquent essay “This Older Generation” (1915). “Form, simplification, strangeness, respect for literature as an art with traditions, abstractness—these are the catchwords that are repeated most often among the younger writers,” Cowley explains. “They are the nearest approach to articulate doctrine of a generation without a school and without a manifesto.” In revolt against the “inchoate realists, like Dreiser,” and “those anti-Puritanical critics, like H. L. Mencken,” he did admit that these writers, who were still working (An American Tragedy appeared four years later), had at least prepared the public for this youngest generation.

“Generation” had become as much a thing as “lost,” Cowley later acknowledged. But his generation was made up of those educated men and women, born around the turn of the century and dislocated by the war, who wrote for little magazines such as the expatriate Secession or the modernist Broom (which aimed to make a clean sweep of the past). In them, Cowley was publishing his poetry alongside the work of the older Lowell, Aiken, and Lola Ridge.

With his ability to speak of himself as if he were his generation’s representative, he successfully publicized his life in Paris, where he briefly hung out with the Dadaists Louis Aragon and Tristan Tzara. His high jinks became the stuff of legend: his punching the proprietor of the Café de la Rotonde in the jaw and his subsequent arrest and night in jail; his setting fire to books and magazines one drunken night, with Dos Passos, Aragon, and Harold Loeb in attendance. Chronicling Cowley’s various experiences in Europe as well as his pranks—some like “a Three Stooges short”—and recounting the internecine squabbles plaguing the small magazines, Howard contends that Cowley’s two years in France, ending in the summer of 1923, conferred on him “a glamour that would lend him considerable prestige and authority that would never wane.”

Having immersed himself in Cowley’s books, Howard often sidesteps any discussion of Cowley’s motivations or demons—or the curious fact that he wrote and rewrote his own experience as the story of an entire generation. For Cowley was never quite sure, it seems, what he wanted to achieve. “In our stage of civilization we find numbers of men who can solve any problem set them, but cannot set themselves problems,” he explained, writing ostensibly about the work of Paul Valéry.

They lack direction. Independence they also lack, since their careers are determined by outside influences—the books they are asked to write…. If the objects set them are unworthy, their minds deteriorate, and in a period of idleness will rust as quickly as a piece of complicated machinery left standing in the rain.

“Twenty-eight, good biceps, bad constitution, nothing accomplished,” he wrote to the literary theorist Kenneth Burke, a boyhood friend.

Having finished one poem or one essay, I have no plans for another…. There are moments when I have convictions, dark and intense, for which I respect myself…but I haven’t the gift of spinning these moments into days or months.

And speaking for his generation, he observed that “we were nevertheless determined to write—but about what?”

According to Howard, “Cowley’s encounters with the French literary elite had borne fruit,” especially after Edmund Wilson, the associate editor of The New Republic, accepted for publication his article on Valéry, whose collection of essays Variety Cowley had just translated. It was a “first-rate piece of work,” Howard writes, and it inaugurated his long-term association with the magazine. Already known and respected as a poet, in 1927 Cowley was awarded a prize from Poetry magazine for a series of seven poems, which he incorporated into Blue Juniata, a volume of verse he published in 1929 with the dogged assistance of his good friend Hart Crane.

Howard describes Blue Juniata as “a durable work of considerable interest” whose reviews “an author and publisher could take to the bank.” It was the first time Cowley wrote at length of his generation’s journey from certainty to loss and back to certainty, and it anticipated Exile’s Return, even using the same metaphors. (Regrettably, Howard quotes very little of it.) Introducing his autobiographical verse with reflections in prose, the young poet from west-central Pennsylvania, not far from the Juniata River, speaks for his “wandering, landless, uprooted generation.” “We had been born with illusions,” he writes, “but having lost them at a very early age, we felt the need of replacing them with others; and we had come to erect the sordid into a kind of religion.” Then, after two years in “a chaotic Europe,” he lives frenetically in “The City of Anger,” where, in syncopated rhythms, he witnesses “the princess with bobbed hair who rides/the rump of the bay mare.” Finally, in the book’s last section, “Old Melodies: Love and Death,” the poet recovers himself, both by reverting to formal verse forms, such as the sonnet, and by protesting (crudely, by today’s standards) the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti: “March on, O dago Christs, while we/march on to spread your name abroad.”

After Blue Juniata, Cowley almost stopped writing poetry. “Society and the wider world were reasserting their claim on the literary imagination,” Howard explains. There may have been other reasons: Peggy Cowley’s brief affair with Crane in Mexico, where she had gone to obtain a divorce, and then Crane’s suicide by jumping overboard while he and Peggy were on their way back to the States. As Cowley later explained when he revised Exile’s Return in 1951, in the earlier edition he had included an extended meditation on the life and suicide of the young and wealthy publisher Harry Crosby, whom he scarcely knew, “in order to avoid discussing the more recent death of Hart Crane, whom I knew so well that I still couldn’t bear to write about him.”

Originally called The Lost Generation, Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas hit the stands in 1934, just two years after Crane’s death, though sections of it had been appearing in The New Republic and the New York HeraldTribune. Cowley changed the title because, he said, his generation had now found itself—suggesting that he had found himself. He clarified his method in a letter to Burke: “Life furnished a good novelistic structure—statement, events that prove it, catastrophe, tangential episode, readjustment.” In other words, deracinated, educated, and middle-class artists like him had tried to escape from the stultifying materialism of America by cultivating an almost religious devotion to art, and though they had failed, they had readjusted, having uncovered “the reason for this state of affairs, which comes from the nature of a ruling class which lives by exploiting everyone else.”

“It wasn’t the depression that got me, it was the boom,” Cowley had explained in 1932 at a dinner in support of William Z. Foster, the Communist Party’s presidential candidate. “I saw all my friends writing the tripe demanded by the present order, stultified and corrupted and unable to make real use of their talents.”

Cowley passionately declares in Exile’s Return that writers will be released from the “feeling of solitude and uniqueness that has been oppressing artists for the last two centuries, the feeling that has reduced some of the best of them to silence or futility and the weaker ones to insanity or suicide,” by aligning themselves with “ordinary people who never heard of Chaucer”—people

without manners or distinction, Negroes, hill billies, poor whites, Jews, Wops and Hunkies. If they should win the struggle here as they have in Russia, there are likely to be years of privation and desperate inefficiency, and there are certain to be harshness, narrowness, fanaticism, the eternal vices of a class struggling to power.

Read retrospectively, Cowley’s call to arms is less condescension—though it is that—than the cri de coeur of a writer adrift and seeking succor.

As the literary editor of The New Republic in the 1930s—which W.H. Auden characterized as “a low dishonest decade”—Cowley reiterated his faith in communism. He disagreed with Dos Passos, who, having become disillusioned with the party, believed, as Cowley noted, that it did nothing but “call down repression on themselves and others.” Even after the Moscow show trials—when many Soviet leaders were accused of treason, confessed or were made to confess, and then were summarily executed—Cowley remained credulous. In 1937 he explained in The New Republic that

I am not a “Stalinist” except in so far as I deeply sympathize with the aims of the Soviet Union, and in so far as I believe that Stalin and his Political Bureau have in general followed wiser policies than those advocated by his enemies.

As for the trials, Cowley wrote that “the major part of the indictment was proved beyond much possibility of doubting it,” claiming that the confessions were “undoubtedly sincere.” “What in God’s name has happened to you?” Wilson exclaimed.

Though Howard points out that Cowley never joined the Communist Party and that he ended his alliance with fellow travelers after the Nazi–Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939, his reluctance to break with the party until relatively late remains puzzling. Howard quotes Cowley’s response in 1982 after being asked whether he’d been duped by communism:

I really can’t understand, except psychologically, the constant accusation of being duped and fooled by the Party…. The duping went right up to the top in Moscow, it went right up to Stalin himself, who was preaching one thing and practicing another.

To this, Howard merely comments, “It is a poignant commentary on Malcolm Cowley’s experiences” that he “still, probably for the hundredth time, had to answer that question.”

While by no means excusing Cowley, Howard maintains that in the 1930s and 1940s “the Communist Party, the Socialists, the Trotskyists, quite a few liberals, and the anti-Communists all had him on their do-down list, sometimes for similar, sometimes for different reasons.” For example, when the Communist-leaning Partisan Review broke with the Communist-fronted League of American Writers, which Cowley had helped found, and relaunched itself as avowedly anti-Stalinist, he pushed back with what Howard rightly calls a “peevish broadside,” berating the magazine for a relentless anti-Stalinist bias in most of its articles, whether on the arts, literature, and politics of the Soviet Union or on Americans who were “friends of the Soviet Union.” Partisan Review printed Dwight Macdonald’s reply, in which he called Cowley’s article a “malicious and politically motivated attack masquerading as a matter of literary differences.”

Comparing the magazine to a “junkyard dog who soon would be escaping through an open rear gate,” Howard writes that

the Partisan Review crowd never quite got over their sense of moral superiority in having apprehended the evils of Stalinism relatively early and the pleasures of demonstrating it by denigrating fellow travelers like Malcolm Cowley.

Further defending Cowley, Howard continues that “such attacks also had the collateral virtue of helping to obscure their own Marxist, committed revolutionary pasts.” And although Cowley was a “living link to the heroic age of American literature,” Howard argues in troubling language that the “contentious tribe” of “terminally urban” New York intellectuals (who never caught a trout, he says) and the “publications of the anti-Communist cultural left,” such as “Irving Howe’s Dissent, The New Leader, and Commentary,” intentionally excluded Cowley, who had moved to Connecticut and was “a genuine man of the country.” (He adds that The New York Review of Books, inheriting Partisan Review’s “mantle of intellectual authority,” failed to review Cowley in the 1970s and 1980s.) To Howard, Cowley was “not so much written out of literary history as insufficiently written in.”

In the 1940s, Cowley hoped to write a sequel to Exile’s Return about the literary ideas of the 1930s. But without steady income from TheNew Republic—he was on book leave and then demoted—he accepted a position in Washington, D.C., as an analyst in the Office of Facts and Figures, headed by his friend Archibald MacLeish. That made him fair game for Texas congressman Martin Dies, the red-baiting chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Under attack, Cowley resigned the post but continued to write shorter pieces, including a profile of Maxwell Perkins for The New Yorker, until a grant from Mary Conover Mellon offered him a yearly income of $5,500 for five years to write whatever he pleased.

He had several new projects in mind: a collection of his essays on French literature, a translation of Aragon’s poetry, a one-volume history of American literature. That, too, never came to pass. “It held the clear potential to be one of the essential books about our literature,” Howard speculates. Instead, Cowley published a long appreciation of Whitman and then, commissioned by Viking, produced the two anthologies that, according to Howard, “would alter the future of American criticism and literature”—the “Portables” of Hemingway and Faulkner.

Cowley continued to edit or coedit anthologies, write introductions to novels, and reprint his essays in book form, and he published his correspondence with and memoir of Faulkner. As an advisory editor at Viking for the rest of his long life, he was something of a scout whose “hidden editorial hand,” Howard writes, “influenced postwar literary studies.” Of course Cowley was not unique; promoters of American literature extended from the nineteenth-century drum banger John Neal through Ralph Waldo Emerson and the editor John O’Sullivan to, in Cowley’s time, men he knew or read, such as Brooks, D.H. Lawrence, Fred Lewis Pattee, and Alfred Kazin. Still, Cowley enthusiastically backed the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, novels by two authors whom Howard considers as important to the culture of the 1960s as Hemingway and Fitzgerald were to that of the 1920s.

In a 2001 article, the scholar Trysh Travis, quoting from Cowley’s unpublished notebooks, persuasively shows that Cowley dismissed his anthologies as mere compilations and regretted that he couldn’t seem to undertake anything longer than a magazine article.^* He didn’t complete his memoir of the 1930s, The Dream of the Golden Mountains, until 1980, after he’d already finished a number of autobiographical essays. Regardless, he was able to publish a revised version of Exile’s Return in 1951, altering the book’s emphasis by subtitling it A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. Excising his Marxist call to arms and adding an elegiac section on Crane, Cowley touchingly remembers him as a “poet of ecstasy or frenzy or intoxication” and continues:

Essentially he was using rhyme and meter and fantastic images to convey the emotional states that were induced in him by alcohol, jazz, machinery, laughter, intellectual stimulation, the shape and sound of words and the madness of New York in the late Coolidge era.

But Cowley observes that Crane “was more lost and driven than the others, and although he kept fleeing toward distant havens of refuge he felt in his heart that he could not escape himself.” And as if tolling the bell for an era, he lyrically concluded in 1951, “The recklessness of the 1920’s, which had once seemed youthful and appealing, was dying away into nervous tears and drunken exasperation.”

In that book, one can hear in the voice of an ambitious man, slightly lost and unsure of his own vocation, the consummate insider who had, as he later privately admitted, “averted my eyes from Stalin’s crimes,” who had written about André Gide, Arthur Schnitzler, Stendhal, François Villon, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and who said he was more influenced by Valéry than by any other author; one can hear the ambivalence, the annoyance, and the discomfiture. And there is, too, the moralist’s abiding commitment to literature and, for better and for worse, to a retrospective view—“painful rethinking,” as he wrote in his letters. “There won’t ever be a Malcolm Cowley Society or a Malcolm Cowley Chair,” he quipped in 1985, when he was eighty-seven. “Why should there be?” Maybe he hadn’t done exactly or fully what he wanted to do, but after diligently working in the writer’s trade, as he called it, he succinctly articulated his aesthetic outlook: “No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.” That would have to suffice.