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The Flower and the Leaf: A Contemporary Record of American Writing Since 1941
With more than five hundred short book reviews, the author links the great flowering of American writing in the first third of this century to its succeeding transmutations
- GenresEssays
390 pages, Hardcover
First published January 31, 1985
6 people want to read
About the author
Malcolm Cowley
168 books32 followersMalcolm 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.
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.
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June 11, 2008
The Flower and the Leaf is a collection of short essays that Cowley has written from 1941 to the early 1980s. The essays cover many literary topics from: authors, works, intellectual issues, and history. They are personal in tone and Cowley's love for books and writers emanates through, even when he is critically analyzing a work or a writer. Some of the many writers he discusses: T.S.Eliot, Faulkner, Cheever, Hawthorne, Whitman, Stein, just to name a few; covers the wide ranging landscape of American literature. Not only does Cowley write about his contemporaries (those identified with the lost generation) but also those of more recent times and those writers which defined American writing.
Displaying 1 of 1 review