Malcolm Cowley

Malcolm Cowley
Malcolm Cowley, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1963
Born	(1898-08-24)August 24, 1898 Belsano, Cambria County, Pennsylvania
Died	March 27, 1989(1989-03-27) (aged 90) New Milford, Connecticut, US
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American

Malcolm Cowley (August 24, 1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.

Born August 28, 1898, in the town of Belsano in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, Cowley grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where his father William was a homeopathic doctor. He attended Shakespeare Street elementary school and graduated from Peabody High School's first graduating class in 1915 where his boyhood friend Kenneth Burke was also a student. In 1920 he earned a B.A. from Harvard University.

He interrupted his undergraduate studies to join the American Field Service in France during World War I. From the Western Front he reported on the war for The Pittsburgh Gazette (today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Upon returning to the USA, Cowley married artist Peggy Baird; they were divorced in 1931. His second wife was Muriel Maurer. Together they had one son, Robert William Cowley, who is an editor and military historian.

He died of a heart attack March 27, 1989.

As one of the dozens of creative literary and artistic figures who migrated during the 1920s to Paris, France and congregated in Montparnasse, Cowley returned to live in France for three years, where he worked with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell, Harry Crosby, Caresse Crosby and others. He is usually regarded as representative of America's Lost Generation. Hemingway removed direct reference to Cowley in a later version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, replacing his name with the description, "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". John Dos Passos's private correspondence revealed the contempt he held for Cowley, but also the care writers took to hide their personal feelings in order to protect their own careers when Cowley became assistant editor of The New Republic. From his two decades of struggling, he (along with Edmund Wilson) later became a well-known chronicler of the expatriate generation.