The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature

A finalist for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction A delightful and majestic reckoning with the ascent of American fiction in the twentieth century through the prism of the under-known man who had an astonishing amount to do with it Malcolm Cowley is not a household name today, but the American literary canon would look very different without him. A prototypical “man of letters” of his generation—Harvard University, a volunteer in the French ambulance corps in World War I, a rite of passage in Paris after the war—he became one of the few truly influential critics of the 1920s and ’30s, along with his close New Republic colleague Edmund Wilson. Cowley’s early support of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and their set—and indeed for framing this group in generational terms in the first place—secured his place in literary history. Most people are lucky to be part of a single game-changing era in their careers; for Cowley, it happened again and again. After emerging from the political fray of the thirties badly damaged, he retreated behind the scenes as a tastemaker whose import has awaited Gerald Howard to be brought into full view. The process of canon formation is a murky business, and Cowley was a prime mover in it for the better part of four decades, through the Lost Generation, the Beat Generation, and the counterculture of the sixties.