Malcolm Cowley

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Malcolm Cowley 1963, photograph by Carl van Vechten

Malcolm Cowley (born August 24, 1898 in Belsano , Pennsylvania ; died March 27, 1989 in New Milford , Connecticut ) was an American writer and publicist. He became known as a chronicler of American modernism , especially as the author of Exile's Return (1934), a disillusioned inventory of the state of mind of the "lost generation " after their return from Europe.

Life

Cowley attended Harvard University from 1915 , where he attended lectures by the poet Amy Lowell , among other things . When the US entered the First World War in 1917, he interrupted his studies and entered the service of the American Field Service ; he was used as an ambulance driver in France. During this time he wrote war reports for the Pittsburgh Gazette . In 1918 he returned and married the artist Peggy Baird. In 1920 he completed his studies at Harvard and moved back to France, where he continued his studies in Montpellier . In Europe, Cowley made friends with other American expatriates , including the literary greats of the time such as Gertrude Stein , Ernest Hemingway , Ezra Pound and TS Eliot . In 1923 he settled in New York's Greenwich Village and thus became not only a witness of the Paris Lost Generation , but also of the New York Jazz Age . At this time he was particularly close friends with the poet Hart Crane . He got by, among other things, with book reviews for The Dial magazine ; His first volume of poetry was published in 1929. Cowley's marriage ended in divorce in 1931, and his ex-wife lived in a wild marriage with Hart Crane until he committed suicide in April 1932. Cowley married Muriel Maurer shortly thereafter.

From 1929-44 he was co-editor of The New Republic magazine , one of the most influential papers on the American left. Like many American intellectuals of the time, he took an active part in political life in the 1930s and became increasingly radical under the influence of Theodore Dreiser ; In 1935 he was a founding member of the left-wing writers' association League of American Writers, from which he left in 1940 because of their now communist orientation. In 1937, Cowley defended the Moscow Trials in The New Republic .

During the Second World War , Cowley was Archibald MacLeish's deputy in 1941 in the Office of Facts and Figures , an agency of the Roosevelt government . However, through the intervention of J. Edgar Hoover and right-wing journalists, he was dismissed after a year because of his political views. They were raised again in 1949 when he testified in the Alger Hiss trial and contradicted the main witness Whittaker Chambers.

In the 1950s Cowley was an employee of the publishing house Viking Press , for which he edited editions of American classics.

Memberships

Works (selection)

  • Blue Juniata. Poems. (1929)
  • The Lost Generation. (1931)
  • Exile's Return. (1934)
  • After the genteel tradition. (1937)
  • A dry season. (1941)
  • The Literary Situation. (1954)
  • Think back on us. (1967)
  • A Many-Windowed House. (1970)
  • Second flowering. (1973)
  • The View from 80. (1976)

Publications

  • How they write. Sixteen interviews. Edited and introduced by Malcolm Cowley. Translated from American English by Wilhelm Borgers and Günther Steinbrinker. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1963
  • Literature in America. A representation of the literary situation in the United States. Translated from American English by Eckart Kroneberg. Walter, Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau 1963
  • Donald W. Faulkner (Ed.): The Portable Malcolm Cowley . Viking, New York 1990, ISBN 014015101X .

Correspondence

  • The Faulkner -Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962 . Viking, New York 1965
  • Thomas Daniel Young (Ed.): Conversations with Malcolm Cowley . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 1986, ISBN 0878052909 .
  • Paul Jay: The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981 . Viking, New York 1988, ISBN 0670813362
  • Hans Bak (Ed.): The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987 . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2014, ISBN 9780674051065 .

literature

  • Hans Bak: Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years . University of Georgia Press, Athens GA 1993, ISBN 0820313238 .
  • James Michael Kempf: The Early Career of Malcolm Cowley: A Humanist among the Moderns . Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1985, ISBN 0807112178 .
  • Lewis P. Simpson: Malcolm Cowley and the American Writer In: The Sewanee Review 84: 2, 1976, pp. 221-247.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ April 7, 1937 edition, see David North : The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century . Mehring, Essen, 2015. ISBN 978-3-88634-132-0 .
  2. ^ Members: Malcolm Cowley. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 24, 2019 .

Web links

Commons : Malcolm Cowley  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
personal data
SURNAME Cowley, Malcolm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer, poet, journalist and literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH August 24, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Belsano, Pennsylvania , USA
DATE OF DEATH March 27, 1989
Place of death New Milford (Connecticut) , USA