The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987

A committed, contentious life at the center of American letters comes alive in this scintillating collection. The book follows Cowley (1898–1989) from his 1920s salad days as a poet and critic in New York and Paris, immersed in fierce literary squabbles over the emerging modernist aesthetic; through his 1930s reign as the New Republic’s literary editor, when he discovered Marxism and drew (not unfounded) accusations of pushing a Stalinist line that dogged him during and after World War II; to his postwar efforts to champion old masters and newcomers, from Fitzgerald and Faulkner to Kerouac and Kesey. Cowley’s letters fizz with gossip, bawdy jokes, lurid anecdotes, witty reflections—“A sort of natural phenomenon like Old Faithful geyser that sends up a jet of steam and mud every hour on the hour” is his characterization of Kerouac’s bursts of automatic writing—and perceptive criticisms of authors he knew well. (“When [Hemingway] became more or less the image he had created of himself... he pretty well stopped being a writer.”) Ably contextualized by editor Bak’s extensive biographical insertions, these missives convey the intense passions aroused by the aesthetic and political upheavals of the 20th century through the pen of one of the era’s leading literary intellectuals. (Jan.)