"Malcolm Cowley: Bringing an American Literary Giant from Out of the Shadows"

Mr. Howard will be in conversation with Professor Roger Gilbert about the eminent twentieth century editor and literary critic Malcolm Cowley (1898--1989), the subject of his forthcoming biography THE INSIDER: Malcolm Cowley and Triumph of American Literature. He will touch on such subjects as Cowley's underappreciated role as a critic, literary tastmaker and career adviser in the American Century; his near-resurrection of the career of William Faulkner from oblivion with his landmark anthology THE PORTABLE FAULKNER; his dogged championing of Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD as an editor at the Viking Press, which was extremely reluctant at first to undertake its publication; the sudden shift to the radical left that he and so many other American literary figures underwent in the thirties and its unfortunate consequences for his career; his writing of EXILE'S RETURN (1934), the first of a subsequent flood of Lost Generation memoirs and still perhaps the best; the postwar relationship of  intellectuals with academia and its effect on our literary culture (and on them); and his hand in shaping the American literary canon that prevails to this day.

Gerald Howard retired in 2021 as executive editor and vice president of Doubleday Books. He received the 2009 Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction, and has worked over the years with authors such as Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Debby Applegate, Hanya Yanagihara, Pat Barker, Sean Wilentz, and Bill Bryson. Howard’s essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, The New York Times Book Review, American Scholar, London Review of Books, n+1, Slate, and other publications.