Think Back on Us: The Social Record

by Malcolm Cowley, Henry Dan Piper (Editor)

During the 1930’ s, one of the liveliest decades in the history of the American mind, Malcolm Cowley was literary editor of the New Republic , the magazine that served more than any other as the intellectual conscience of a generation. The impressive collection of essays and reviews of this gifted commentator from that period is a kind of topical chronicle of the era. From hundreds of reviews and essays, Henry Dan Piper has selected and arranged these articles to offer a source book of readings in the epoch’ s intellectual, social, and literary history.

The volume is divided into two parts, and the articles are arranged chronologically. Part 1, The Social Record, illuminates the issues, problems, and ideas of the period. Part 2, The Literary Record, contains articles which deal chiefly with literary values. In addition, Mr. Cowley has written a lively, new, retrospective essay for this volume, “ Adventures of a Book Reviewer,” in itself a classic on the art of the book review. No important name and no vital issue of this significant period is omitted from this record, attesting to Mr. Cowley’ s remarkable discernment and to the purity of his artistic judgment. Thus, the record has a special value for the student of the era.

216 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1972

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.