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Nonfiction

American Literature Owes a Great Debt to This 20th-Century ‘Insider’

By championing now-essential writers like William Faulkner, Malcolm Cowley helped remake the U.S. literary canon.

Malcolm Cowley was an influential editor, writer and book critic who helped bring William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey and other pivotal figures to U.S. readers.Credit...Bettmann/Getty Images

Nov. 10, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET

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THE INSIDER: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, by Gerald Howard

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It’s hard to believe now, but in 1944 every one of William Faulkner’s 17 books was out of print except for “Sanctuary,” a thriller he’d written to pay the mortgage. He was only in his late 40s but his career was in eclipse. Maxwell Perkins, the venerated Scribner’s editor, had declared: “Faulkner is finished.” Faulkner’s publisher nudged him further into oblivion when it donated some of his novels’ printing plates — who’ll need these again? — to be melted down for the war effort.

Among the books out of print were several interrelated novels written between 1929 and 1942, “The Sound and the Fury,” “As I Lay Dying,” “Light in August,” “Absalom, Absalom!” and “Go Down, Moses.” Each was set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss. Each is now recognized as among the most vital and important novels of the 20th century, but that was hardly the case at the time. Faulkner’s work had never sold well, and it had long ago been pounded into dust by popular critics such as Clifton Fadiman of The New Yorker, who found Faulkner a puzzling bore.

Enter Malcolm Cowley, the subject of Gerald Howard’s sensitive, well-reported and probing new book “The Insider.” By the mid-1940s, Cowley had already led several lives. He’d been in Paris during the 1920s and was a figure in the so-called Lost Generation, becoming perhaps its best chronicler when his memoir, “Exile’s Return,” appeared in 1934. His well-regarded first book of poems, “Blue Juniata,” came out in 1929. For much of the 1930s, he was the literary editor of The New Republic, taking over from Edmund Wilson at a time when this was a many-tentacled power perch in American letters.

Cowley was radicalized by the Great Depression. Though not a member of the Communist Party, he might as well have been — he mounted every barricade there was to mount, becoming in Howard’s words “a literary action figure.” He could really give a speech. Cowley was among the last to grasp the evils of Stalinism. He lost his editorship and was seen by powerful figures as an enemy within, his reputation permanently dented.

He was living in the country — if you consider his farmhouse on seven acres in Sherman, Conn., to be the country — when he edited the compendium, “The Portable Faulkner,” that would return Faulkner to prominence and remake American literature.

This was “one of the most important rescue missions in American literary history, comparable perhaps only to the rediscovery of Herman Melville’s work in the early 20th century after decades of obscurity and neglect,” Howard writes. “And happily, Faulkner was alive and able to enjoy the fruits of rediscovery.”

Viking, the publishing house, had begun its “Portable” compilation series to provide soldiers with reading material during the war. Cowley had already edited “The Portable Hemingway” (1944), a book that revised and expanded that writer’s reputation and, perhaps most important, “rendered Hemingway’s work teachable,” in Howard’s words.

Faulkner was a harder sell. Almost no one at Viking thought the book worth doing. Howard, a longtime book editor of serious repute, explains how Cowley worked an inside and outside game to prepare the ground for the anthology. It didn’t hurt that Cowley knew almost everyone and was able to place his own essays about Faulkner in prominent magazines.

The subtitle of “The Insider” is “Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature.” Howard makes the case that, in setting Faulkner’s attainments into the larger context of literature, he made it possible to see America’s literary achievement whole for the first time. A million American studies and American literature classes were waiting to be born.

“The Portable Faulkner,” published with a dense 30-page genealogy of the Compson family provided by Faulkner, wasn’t a greatest hits assemblage. Crucially, it provided a timeline of the entire Yoknapatawpha saga — it showed how everything hung together. It was published in 1946. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize four years later.

Howard’s book is not a proper biography of Cowley. One of those already exists, though it’s still in progress: The academic Hans Bak published Part 1 of a planned two-volume Cowley biography in 1993. The second volume has yet to appear. Howard is more interested, profitably, in giving us set pieces and in tracing a series of ideas. His book, like Cowley’s “Portable Faulkner,” is a labor of love. He argues that Cowley is too often misunderstood and forgotten.

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Cowley (1898-1989) grew up in rural Pennsylvania, the son of a homeopathic physician. He did well in school and won a scholarship to Harvard, where he was only semi-accepted socially.

One of the best of this book’s set pieces is of Cowley’s close and tangled friendship with the poet Hart Crane. Indeed, Cowley’s first wife had an affair with Crane — she was apparently the first and only woman the gay poet ever had sex with. Theirs was a real love. She was on board the ship from Veracruz to New York with Crane when he leaped off and died by suicide. She was the inspiration for Crane’s poignant poem “The Broken Tower.”

Another good set piece is Cowley’s championing of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and his efforts to finally get it published after so many others had turned it down. He also discovered Ken Kesey while teaching writing at Stanford and published Kesey’s first novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Howard is interested in Cowley as a literary middleman, in how he worked the levers of power not only as an editor and publisher but as a personage with connections to the writer’s retreat Yaddo, to the Guggenheims and to umpteen other foundations and prize committees.

I wish “The Insider” were about a hundred pages shorter. It’s more than 500 pages and sometimes places the reader in the weeds without a scythe. I wish Howard had taken us a bit closer to Cowley the man — what he wore, ate, smoked, drank and saw from his desk. There aren’t a lot of these sorts of homely but somehow vital details.

I also wish that Howard had shown us more facets of Cowley as the weekly book critic at The New Republic. He writes that “Cowley stood in relation to books in the ’30s much the way Pauline Kael did to films in The New Yorker in the ’70s: It was a requirement in intellectual circles that you have an opinion about his opinion.” I could have used more examples of Cowley’s everyday critical prose, his likes and dislikes, his critical temper; I wasn’t able to feel the indefatigably opinionated Kael in him.

Cowley had a big capacity for friendship, but he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Hemingway, in his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), was talking about Cowley in Paris when he described “that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement.” Edmund Wilson referred to Cowley in a letter as “sort of an ass.”

Mary McCarthy was a lifelong enemy. So were most of the New York intellectuals, who snapped at him like lobsters. Howard suggests that Cowley was more rural and slow-talking, alien to their urbanized ethos.

My cavils about Howard’s book are mild ones. He’s a sensitive discriminator; he takes a lot of old battles out of their archival plastic and makes them fresh again.

I like a book with good acknowledgments. Here is a paragraph from Howard’s: “A big no-thanks to the sloppy bureaucrats of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for either ignoring my requests for Cowley’s files or, for God’s sake, telling me that no such files exist. Luckily, I found that file at the Newberry [Library]. Anyway, thanks for nothing.”

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THE INSIDER: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature | By Gerald Howard | Penguin Press | 534 pp. | $35

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.

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