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...