New England Writers and Writing

by Malcolm Cowley, Donald W. Faulkner (Editor)

For more than half a century, Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) cast a long shadow across the landscape of American literary criticism, forming our views of luminaries like Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway and enhancing our understanding of dozens of others. A transplanted but long-time New Englander, Cowley focused much of his critical attention on the region's plethora of eminent authors, and this collection combines those essays with his writings about the New England he knew and loved.
Cowley is equally at home with Hawthorne, James, Emerson, Melville, Frost, Aiken, Cheever, Cummings - and the characters and customs of his adoptive region. In a poem included here, Cowley writes of his wish to love the earth and "to speak some words in patterns that will be remembered." This book is testimony to his gift for - and fulfillment of - both.

Genres: Literary Criticism

333 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 1996

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

[Kayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a remainder find that supports my belief in wandering bookstores until something jumps out at you. Mr. Cowley writes with New England wit and rigor about earlier writers: Hawthorne, Whitman, Crane, and Conrad Aiken. Aiken was a poet and author whom I had never heard of before but writes this about his childhood:

".....after the desultory early-morning quarrel came the half-stifled scream, and then the sound of his father's voice counting three, and the two loud pistol shots; and he had tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless, and apart, and, finding them dead, found himself possesssed of them forever."

Cowley knew this author and many others, which lends his criticism a personal touch that is still quite bounded. For instance, his son was married to John Cheever's daughter and they divorced, no details forthcoming in this book, as it should be.

Overall, a lovely read!