Malcolm Cowley

Author and editor Malcolm Cowley was born on 8/24/1898 in Belsano, Pennsylvania. He interrupted his studies at Harvard University for service in World War I, in which he was an ambulance driver for the US Army on the French front. He returned to Harvard after the war, and graduated in 1920. He then studied at the University of Montpellier in France. He worked for an architectural catalog for a while, then went freelance, contributing book reviews to various magazines and translating the works of several French authors into English. In 1929 he became associate editor of "The New Republic" magazine and was head of its literary department for 13 years. He wrote the semi-autobiographical "Exile's Return", about the effect of World War I on American writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, and how their experiences in turn affected American literature. In 1944 he left "The New Republic" and struck out on his own as a writer, although he was a literary advisor to the Viking Press publishing house from 1948. He wrote several books and edited several collections of books by other writers. He became quite in demand as a lecturer at colleges and universities. He was twice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and was a Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died of a heart attack in Milford, Connecticut, on March 28, 1989.