Malcolm Cowley, poet, critic, editor, cultural commentator, translator--in the exact professional sense, literary historian--is best known for painting in Exile's Return (1934, revised 1951) the accepted picture of the "lost generation" of writers that matured during and after World War I. Exile's Return chronicles his French experiences in the early twenties and delineates the importance of Paris to American writers of the period who, "feeling like aliens in the commercial world, sailed for Europe as soon as they had money to pay for their steamer tickets." As a young writer in France from June 1921 to August 1923, Cowley met or was influenced by the important writers of his generation. That experience and his formal study, while there, of French history and literature provided a sound base for his developing critical aesthetic and, later, for his eclectic, cosmopolitan literary interests.

Born on 24 August 1898 in a farmhouse near Belsano, Pennsylvania, Cowley attended Peabody...