The Insider - Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature

A delightful and majestic reckoning with the ascent of American fiction in the 20th century through the prism of the little-known man who had an astonishing amount to do with it

Malcolm Cowley is little known today, but the American literary canon would look very different without him. A prototypical “man of letters” of his generation—Harvard, a volunteer in the French ambulance corps in World War I, a rite of passage in Paris after the war—he became one of the few truly influential critics of the 1920’s and 30’s, along with his close New Republic colleague Edmund Wilson, his place in literary history secure for his early support of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and their set, and indeed for framing this group in generational terms in the first place.

Most people are lucky to be part of a single game-changing era in their careers; for Cowley, it happened again and again. After emerging from the political fray of the 30’s badly damaged, he retreated to more of a behind-the-scenes role as a taste-maker whose import has awaited Gerald Howard to be brought into full view. The process of literary canon formation is a murky business, and Cowley was a prime mover in it for the better part of four decades, through The Lost Generation, The Beat Generation, and The Counterculture of the 60s. Without him, the odds would be much longer that the names William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey, to name just three, would have ever echoed.

In The Insider, Gerald Howard gives an intimate accounting of the fever graph of a fascinating and multifaceted career in the literary trade that uses that career to tell a much bigger story of how American literature took the course that it did from the 1920’s to the 1960’s. It’s a story of an art form, and an industry, and a country, experiencing wrenching change, and the people who made a home in the storm and in no small part shaped it. Howard’s own career as a literary weathermaker is justly acclaimed, and he has brought all of his gifts of head and heart to bear in crafting this extraordinary book. It’s a gift to book lovers, and a major contribution to the cultural history of this country.