A Many-Windowed House: Collected Essays on American Writers and American Writing

by Malcolm Cowley, Henry Dan Piper (Editor)

The fourteen essays selected and edited by Henry Dan Piper present for the first time together Malcolm Cowley’ s critical assessments of major nineteenth and early twentieth-century American writers. Larger in scope than Think Back on Us , in which were published Mr. Cowley’ s pieces about the 1930s, principally from the New Republic , the present volume draws from his amazingly wide and varied literary understanding. These essays recapture parts of America’ s past and anticipate its uncertain future.

The book’ s final essay, from which the metaphoric title is derived, provides a key to Mr. Cowley’ s critical it is an attitude of positive eclecticism, essentially humanistic, and anti-scientific. To write about the man behind the pen, Mr. Cowley looks through many windows, and is able to see more than many of his fellow practitioners of literary criticism.

Genres: Essays

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

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.