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Informationen zum Autor Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) a leadiing literary figure of his time, wrote numerous books of literary criticism, essays, and poetry. Klappentext The adventures and attitudes shared by the American writers dubbed "the lost generation", are brought to life in this book of prose works. Feeling alienated in the America of the 1920s, Fitzgerald, Crane, Hemingway, Wilder, Dos Passos, Cowley and others "escaped" to Europe, as exiles. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Malcolm Cowley grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and interrupted his undergraduate career at Harvard to drive a camion during World War I. He moved to New York City in 1919 and worked as an editor of The New Republic from 1929 to 1940. He served as president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters from 1956 to 1959 and from 1962 to 1965 and was chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1966 to 1976. He wrote numerous books of literary criticism, essays, and poetry, and edited many collections and anthologies. Among his many awards and honors were the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the Hubbell Medal of the Modern Language Association for service to the study of American literature. Donald W. Faulkner is the editor of Malcolm Cowley’s The Flower and the Leaf: A Contemporary Record of American Writing Since 1945 (1985) and The Portable Malcolm Cowley (1990). He has written extensively on Cowley for literary journals, and was a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where Cowley’s papers are housed. Faulkner teaches literature and creative writing at Yale University. EXILE’S RETURN A LITERARY ODYSSEY OF THE 1920S MALCOLM COWLEY EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DONALD W. FAULKNER Introduction Among the chronicles, memoirs, and remembrances of the making of American literature in the 1920s, Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return stands alone. Far from the “we put on boxing gloves and Ernest Hemingway broke my nose” recollections of that shaping period for a national literature, Cowley’s work is “a narrative of ideas,” as he subtitled the original edition of his book, published in 1934. Save for a handful of anecdotes, the book is not an accumulation of silvered memories, but a meditative exploration of the design and goals of literary culture. It is a book written by a young man about a young time, and its extolling of a young generation’s ability to cast off the baggage of its forebears and forge its own identity has quickened the hearts of generations of readers who have found resonance in its story. It continues to speak. Indeed, Exile’s Return is not so much about Paris in the 1920s as it is about the exemplary revolt of one generation against its predecessors in the effort to establish itself. Much later in his life—Cowley died in 1989 at age ninety after a distinguished career in American letters, the bulk of it spent shaping our estimations of American literature—he wrote of the preconditions he saw for both generational self-identification and generational revolt. First among them, he said, is “a sense of life, something that might be defined as an intricate web of perceptions, judgments, feelings, and aspirations shared by its members.” Next is the generation’s “thoroughness and even violence in setting aside parental or merely prevailing notions.” Then each gen...
