The Man Who Rescued Faulkner

How the critic Malcolm Cowley made American literature into its own great tradition

- By Michael Gorra

The critic and editor Malcolm Cowley had a record as a literary-talent spotter that was unmatched in the American Century. At The New Republic in 1930, where he'd recently become the literary editor at 32, he published "Expelled," the first short story by a then-teenage John Cheever to appear in a national magazine (one that didn't usually publish fiction). A few years later, Cowley gave a second teenager his start in reviewing: a Brooklyn boy named Alfred Kazin. In the 1940s, at the Viking Press, Cowley initiated the resurrection of William Faulkner from oblivion, a project that put the writer on the syllabus in the ever-expanding postwar university, brought the rest of his work back into print, and surely helped win him the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Cowley went on to battle reluctant Viking colleagues to ensure the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957. In 1960, he found Ken Kesey in a creative-writing class he taught at Stanford, and helped shape One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The journey from Cheever to Kerouac and Kesey, via Faulkner, was one that not many editors could have covered.

Nowadays some would call Cowley a gatekeeper, except that the term has acquired an invidious ring; Cowley’s power and influence lay in opening, not shutting, the door to a new generation. He came of age at an especially fertile literary moment, after World War I, and he had a special interest in the work of his contemporaries, in the homegrown modernism of Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. He had an even bigger goal as well, pursued in several now-classic works, starting with Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934). Cowley aspired to raise the status of American writing as a whole. He wanted to see it recognized as more than a mere appendage to British literature, as a great tradition in its own right.