Malcolm Cowley Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Malcolm Cowley

Malcolm Cowley is best known as a critic and literary historian whose sound judgment, understanding, and polished prose have earned him in a long lifetime of working "at the writer's trade," a place beside Van Wyck Brooks and Edmund Wilson as one of the foremost professional literary critics in twentieth-century America. His work as a literary historian and critic has been especially concerned with chronicling the activities and interpreting the works of the American writers who came to maturity during and after World War I, a group of which he was part and which was named, in a chance remark by Gertrude Stein, the lost generation. In the words of Philip Young, "the commentary on which [Cowley] spent so many years no longer seems ... just a history of its writers but a part of what was written." The discernment and understanding apparent in his criticism, which is characterized by broad generalization and close analysis equally, certainly owe much to the fact that he has himself written poetry.

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