The Man Who Helped Make the American Literary Canon

In the nineteen-thirties and forties, young book critics on the make used to crowd outside the office of Malcolm Cowley, the literary editor of The New Republic, in the hopes of his attention. Cowley—who had established himself as the historian of the Lost Generation par excellence with “Exile’s Return,” a memoir of living in France alongside the not-yet-famous writers Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others—was undeniably one of the few men in American letters who defined the taste of the reading public. He could help a struggling writer keep the lights on, or, even better, anoint them. The sad young literary men and women he plucked from the crowd were thus invited into the ranks of the country’s tastemakers.