Malcolm Cowley

Bio

(1898-1989) Critic, poet, editor. Born in Belasco, Pennsylvania; lived at 107 Bedford St., 88 W. 3rd St., and 35 Bank St. He also lived at 360 W. 22nd St. and on E. 55th St.; Cowley won a scholarship to Harvard in 1915. After serving in France during WWI, he returned to Harvard in 1920, writing poetry and book reviews for the Dial and the New York Evening Post. In 1921, he went back to France where he studied at the University of Montpellier, associating himself with the avant-garde literary magazines Broom and Secession. While he was in France he befriended GERTRUDE STEIN, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, and EZRA POUND. He returned to the US in 1923, and moved to Greenwich Village. He wrote Exile’s Return (1933) and in 1935 established with other left-wing writers the League of American Writers. In the 1940s Cowley became literary adviser to Viking Press and spearheaded several important Viking Portable Editions — Ernest Hemingway (1944), William Faulkner (1946), and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1948). He republished Exile’s Return in 1951, and Second Flowering (1973), both about his contacts among the “lost generation” in Europe of the 1920s. He wrote a book review column for the New Republic.