A biography of the little-known editor and literary critic Malcolm Cowley, who helped shape the American literary landscape in the first half of the twentieth century and established the careers and cemented the legacies of famed writers such as William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey.
Sensitive, well-reported, and probing ... Howard’s book is not a proper biography of Cowley. One of those already exists, though it’s still in progress ... Howard is more interested, profitably, in giving us set pieces and in tracing a series of ideas ... I wish The Insider were about a hundred pages shorter. It’s more than 500 pages and sometimes places the reader in the weeds without a scythe ... My cavils about Howard’s book are mild ones. He’s a sensitive discriminator; he takes a lot of old battles out of their archival plastic and makes them fresh again.
Details...events sternly but with evident reluctance. Mr. Howard’s argument, which I find persuasive, is that Cowley’s stint as an ideologue was a short-term folly that does not fundamentally implicate his literary endeavors ... Suggests that the work of culture is as reliant on good administration as on artistic talent. Cowley had taste and practical know-how. We could use bureaucrats like that today.
Howard does more than highlight the ways in which—through the recommendation of residency recipients, the publication of essays and books, the mentoring of students, or the revival of out-of-print works—Cowley shaped individual literary careers. Rather, as Howard, a former book editor himself, sees it, Cowley’s agitation for the cause of his country’s literature also helped to vault what was once seen as a minor, regional tradition into a world-historical one ... Across Howard’s biography, a routine plays itself out: Cowley decides that a figure, whether it is a forgotten writer or an unproven one, deserves more attention, and he mobilizes ... The impression produced by Howard’s biography is of Cowley as a Zelig-like character present at every important moment in American literary life.
