New England Writers and Writing (Library of New England)

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.

Literary editor for The New Republic from 1929 to 1940 and advisory editor at Viking Press from 1944 until his death, MALCOLM COWLEY published or edited more than 30 books, from such early works as Exile's Return (1934) to important later collections such as A Second Flowering (1973).

DONALD W. FAULKNER teaches modern literature and creative writing at Yale University, where he also directs the Summer Creative Writing Program. He edited a 1994 edition of Exile's Return, The Portable Malcolm Cowley (1990), and Cowley's The Flower and the Leaf (1985).