Malcolm Cowley: Voice of the Lost Generation

One of the most important chroniclers of American literary modernism was born in eighteen ninety-eight in Cambria County in the hills of western Pennsylvania. Malcolm Cowley grew up watching the mountain landscape that would later inspire his poetry collection Blue Juniata, named for the river valley you can see from these ridges. After serving in World War One, Cowley moved to Paris, where he befriended Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the expatriate writers Gertrude Stein called the Lost Generation.

His memoir Exile's Return, published in nineteen thirty-four, remains the definitive account of that circle. Back in the United States, Cowley became a powerful literary editor at The New Republic, championing William Faulkner at a moment when Faulkner's books were out of print. He served as Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from nineteen sixty-six to nineteen seventy-six.

He died in New Milford, Connecticut in nineteen eighty-nine, ninety years old.