...And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History 1918-1978

by Malcolm Cowley

Poet, critic, editor, and author, Malcolm Cowley has played a pivotal part in American literature and has dealt with diverse literary figures as Erskine Caldwell, Conrad Aiken, and William Faulkner among others from New York's Greenwich Village to Paris from after World War I to the youth movement of the 1960s into the 1970s.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, Essays, Writing

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Malcolm Cowley was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist. Cowley is also recognized as one of the major literary historians of the twentieth century, and his Exile's Return, is one of the most definitive and widely read chronicles of the 1920s.

Cowley was one of the dozens of creative literary and artistic figures who migrated during the 1920s to Paris and congregated in Montparnasse. He lived in France for three years, where he worked with notables such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings and others. He is usually regarded as representative of America's Lost Generation.

As a consulting editor for Viking Press, Cowley notably championed the work and advanced the careers of the post-World War I writers who sundered tradition and fostered a new era in American literature. He was the one who rescued writers such as William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald from possible early oblivion and who discovered John Cheever and goaded him to write. Later Cowley championed such uncommon writers as Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey

His extraordinarily creative and prolific writing career spanned nearly 70 years, and he continued to produce essays, reviews and books well into his 80's.

Reviews

[P.J. Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book suggests autobiography, but this is not autobiography, except for one chapter. It is mostly literary criticism, a discussion of American letters during the author’s lifetime. The literary work itself should be the focus of the critic’s attention, he thought, but also the writers, their social backgrounds, their influences, and “the myths that they embodied in their work.”

There are chapters on individual writers—Faulkner, Hemingway, Conrad Aiken, Erskine Caldwell—Cowley knew all the prominent ones. But he liked to combine authors into clusters, groups, generations, and sort them by regions and time periods. At times he seems to be less interested in the writers themselves than in their contexts. He tends toward abstractions—literary isms, literary ideals and how they change. Literary trends, patterns, cycles, zeitgeists, expansions and contractions of scope, spheres of influence.

As with his other books of criticism, this one is sociological as well as literary. There is a lot of history here, and even some philosophy. It discusses in detail how writers write fiction, and asks: Can bad people create good literature?

Recommended to readers interested in American literature, its history and practice, during the twentieth century.