Cowley was born August 24, 1898, in Belsano, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, to William Cowley and Josephine Hutmacher. He grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of See more

Cowley was one of the many literary and artistic figures who migrated to Paris in the 1920s. He became one of the best-known chroniclers of the American expatriates in Europe, as he frequently spent … See more

While in Paris, Cowley found himself drawn to the avant-garde sensibilities of Dada, and also, like many other intellectuals of the period, to Marxism and its attempts to demystify the socioeconomic and political conditions that had plunged … See more

In 1944, having been more or less silenced politically, Cowley began a career as a literary advisor, editor, and talent scout at Viking Press. He was hired to work on the Portable Library series, which had started in 1943 with As You Were: A Portable Library of American … See more

Cowley married artist Peggy Baird; they were divorced in 1931. His second wife was Muriel Maurer. Together they had one son, Robert William Cowley, who is an editor and military historian.
He died of a heart attack March 27, 1989. See more

• Malcolm, Cowley, The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014
• Paul, Jay (1989). The selected correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981. University of … See more

• List of ambulance drivers during World War I
• Letters to Cowley from Yvor Winters in The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, ed. R. L. Barth, Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio UP, 2000. See more