This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Malcolm Cowley was never quite a famous writer. His publications are generally overlooked — even his 1962 volume Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1518–1865, written in collaboration with Daniel Pratt Mannix IV, a children’s writer and animal photographer who performed for a time in a travelling carnival as “The Great Zadma”. Cowley, by contrast, was a freelance literary critic for much of his life who somehow ended up as chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Cowley’s name may be vaguely familiar to anyone who has read biographies of 20th century American novelists or leafed through the correspondence of Edmund Wilson, the most distinguished of Princeton — educated men of letters. But he is best known for his friendship with Hart Crane, sometimes described as America’s answer to Arthur Rimbaud because he, too, was an uneducated gay alcoholic who wrote poetry. Cowley’s first wife, Marguerite “Peggy” Baird, was the first and last woman Crane ever slept with. Shortly after they made love, he committed suicide.
(Penguin, £35)
Cowley’s main claim to literary immortality is his appearance in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), where he is described as “that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada Movement with a Romanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara”. Cowley’s sole volume of poetry was published in 1929; he stopped calling himself a poet shortly thereafter.
If Cowley seems an unlikely subject for a biography, the publishing executive and occasional book reviewer Gerald Howard would beg to differ. He first met Cowley in 1981 and even attended Cowley’s ninetieth birthday party. The event is described in The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, which is more than 500 pages long.
Throughout his life, Cowley was often mistaken for a farm boy. As F. Scott Fitzgerald’s friend John Peale Bishop wrote in a letter to Edmund Wilson: “Look at the hands if you get a chance. The Ploughboy of the Western World who has been to Paris.” In fact, Cowley came from a relatively intellectual family — his father was an impoverished practitioner of homeopathic medicine. Even so, Cowley did not quite fit in at Harvard.
After two lonely years of undergraduate studies, Cowley volunteered to serve in the First World War, not as a soldier, but as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service. He spent a few months in France in 1917, reading poetry and driving a lorry every now and again. Upon his return to America, he wore his American Field Service uniform around Harvard as often as he could. It lent him an air of prestige, but he remained unpopular on campus nonetheless.
In August 1919 he married Peggy Baird, who sought recognition variously as a suffragette and a landscape painter, but never managed to overcome being known as a “loose woman”. Cowley’s parents found her disgusting; if they had had any money, they would have surely cut off their son’s allowance.
In July 1921, Cowley began a two-year scholarship at the University of Montpellier in the South of France, thanks again to the American Field Service, which seems to have been far more professionally useful to him than Harvard ever was. Although he spent most of his time in Montpellier working on his dissertation, he travelled occasionally to Paris and even met James Joyce a few times.
Cowley was one of the first American citizens to finish reading all of Marcel Proust in French and then advertise the fact in a lengthy magazine article. In this way he established one of the few American literary genres that continues to flourish to this day — the middlebrow “humblebrag” essay.
Cowley’s experiences in Paris were later mythologised in his 1934 memoir Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s, which became successful in the 1950s when it was widely mistaken for a reliable account of what it was like to get drunk on a regular basis with Ernest Hemingway. In truth, Cowley spent most of the 1920s on the fringes of New York literary society, writing book reviews whilst being cuckolded by the playwright Eugene O’Neill (amongst other notable figures). Then he was hired in October 1929 by The New Republic, the most formidable progressive intellectual journal in America.
One of Cowley’s first discoveries as a literary editor was the short story writer John Cheever, who had been kicked out of school at 17 and wanted to memorialise the experience in a piece of autobiographical fiction. Cowley’s wife gave Cheever his first cocktail, a Manhattan made from bootlegged liquor. Cheever drank five of these, then vomited at a patch of wallpaper. Thus began Cheever’s lifelong struggles with alcohol.
Although Cowley never formally joined the Communist Party, he was a committed Stalinist throughout the 1930s. Political activities inevitably took up much of his time and began to influence his approach to literature. At the American Writers’ Congress in April 1935, he gave a lecture entitled “What the Revolutionary Movement can do for the Writer”. His increasingly strident defences of Stalin began to embarrass his New Republic colleagues; he was demoted in 1940, and his salary was cut in half. When he left the magazine, he found himself all but unemployable.
For a few years, Cowley was desperately poor. Then, in 1944, he was unexpectedly awarded a five-year fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, which granted him the financial independence to spend his time editing anthologies, first of Hemingway’s writings, then William Faulkner’s. For three years he tried and failed to write a short history of American literature. Like so many book-obsessed people, he was vastly better at reading other people’s writing than he was at producing anything of value himself.
After Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, Cowley acquired a reputation as a literary talent-spotter. Yet his only real discoveries were Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road, which was published in 1957 after years of editorial tinkering, and Ken Kesey’s 1962 bestseller One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Both books remain popular to this day, but neither Kerouac nor Kesey were able to follow up their success, and Cowley was useless in terms of guiding them. He never understood very much about literature, let alone the people who create it.
The Insider gives the reader little sense of Cowley’s personality. Then again, Cowley could make even the Spanish Civil War sound bland, insipid and bathetic — his 1983 memoir of a visit to Madrid in 1937 is arguably the dullest non-academic piece of writing to emerge from the entire conflict. The question of why anyone would think Malcolm Cowley deserves our attention remains baffling.
