Cowley, Malcolm [key], 1898–1989, American critic and poet, b. Belsano, Pa., grad. Harvard, 1920. He lived abroad in the 1920s and knew many writers of the “lost generation,” about whom he wrote in Exile's Return (1934) and Second Flowering (1973). For much of the 1930s he was the literary editor of the New Republic and wrote a book-review column for that influential periodical. He later championed the works of such writers as Jack Kerouac, John Cheever, Ken Kesey, Joyce Carol Oates, and Thomas Pynchon. His own works include The Blue Juniata (1927) and A Dry Season (1942), poems; The Literary Situation (1954), a critical analysis; and Many Windowed Houses: Collected Essays on Writers and Writing (1970).
See his selected letters ed. by H. Bak (2013).
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