Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years

Bak, Hans

ISBN 10: 0820313238 / ISBN 13: 9780820313238

Published by University Of Georgia Press, Athens, 1993

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 9014390

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years
• Publisher: University Of Georgia Press, Athens
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0820313238
• ISBN 13: 9780820313238
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Fine/Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • Book

About this title

Synopsis

The first volume in a two-volume biography of the great man of letters explores Cowley's early years, his childhood and adolescence in western Pennsylvania, his service in World War I, and his years at Harvard.

Reviews

Poet, critic, chronicler of the "lost generation," champion of Hemingway and Faulkner, Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) charted a trajectory from Pennsylvania farmboy to follower of French dadaists in Paris to political radical and Stalinist fellow-traveler in 1930s New York to member of the literary establishment. Bak's masterful, vivid, eloquent critical biography, first half of a two-volume opus, is a major reassessment of Cowley's place in American letters. After his early embrace of symbolist esthetics, Cowley repudiated the modernism of Eliot, Joyce and Pound for its dissociation of life from art. His main concern--creating an environment capable of sustaining the American writer--makes him a relevant figure. Bak, a professor of American literature in the Netherlands who interviewed Cowley and combed his personal files, illuminates the writer's Harvard years, his disenchanted bohemian existence in Greenwich Village and his unstable first marriage to free-living artist Peggy Baird, from whom Cowley contracted syphilis. Bak lays bare the turbulent inner life of a spiritual exile reclaiming his roots. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It's quite a feat of literary bravery to attempt a major biographical study of an author famous for his own autobiographical work, but Dutch scholar Bak (American literature, Catholic Univ. of Nijmegen) pulls it off. Poet, essayist, and critic Malcolm Cowley, who died in 1989, is now best known for several memoirs of his life as an expatriate writer and disillusioned communist, including And I Worked at the Writer's Trade ( LJ 4/15/78). Bak has used these works, plus unpublished writings, letters, and interviews with his subject to produce the first readable and scholarly study of Cowley's intellectual development up to 1930. It supersedes James Michael Kempf's The Early Years of Malcolm Cowley (Louisiana State Univ. Pr., 1985) and is an essential purchase for most literary collections, both general and specialized. (Index, illustrations not seen.)-- Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.