New England Writers and Writing

Cowley, literary editor of the New Republic until 1944 and lifelong student of American literature, lived in the hamlet of Sherman, Conn., from 1936 until his death in 1989. Best known for Exile's Return (1934), written after his postwar ``exile'' in France, Cowley wrote critical studies of numerous American writers including Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. But it was to the writers of New England, and to the region as a setting, that he devoted much of his writing life. Collected here are 25 examinations and appreciations, their subjects ranging chronologically from Nathaniel Hawthorne to John Cheever. Cowley knew personally many of the writers about whom he wrote, and the chapters on the likes of Eugene O'Neill, Hart Crane and Cheever are as much memoir as literary criticism. He is at his best when he examines a writer's life and work in the context of community, and he is unafraid to take on the icons of his era; in ``Robert Frost: A Dissenting Opinion,'' he finds in the poet's works not so much an admirable self-reliance as ``the inward turning or backward turning of energies in a region that once had wider horizons.'' The volume closes with a delightful bonus--a dozen of Cowley's own reflections, in prose and poetry, on the Housatonic River, on growing melons, on election night in Sherman and other aspects of New England life--and a conversation between Cowley and his son Robert. (Jan.)