I. Live long enough and eventually people will come calling and start asking you questions. In the last decades of his very long life — ninety years, from 1898 to 1989 — the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley became an increasingly attractive target of opportunity for a phalanx of inquiring minds who wanted to pick his brain about his personal history with the marquee names of American literature in the twentieth century. One of the dubious honors that attend literary longevity is that the survivor can become regarded as something like a vending machine of anecdotes and facts about the distinguished departed by biographers, historians, literary scholars, graduate students, and the merely curious and intrusive. They were right to do so. Cowley had been in the thick of the action in American literature ever since he arrived at Harvard from Pittsburgh in 1915 as a scholarship student. He had driven a munitions truck on the Western Front as one of the many literary-minded “gentleman volunteers”; lived in France as the first wave of American cultural pilgrims hit the Left Bank (and wrote about it, first and perhaps best, in his classic memoir Exile’s Return); replaced Edmund Wilson as the literary editor of The New Republic, a true power seat in American letters; and made himself all too visible in the 1930s when American writers took a hard left turn politically. The breadth of his associations and his significant actions as an editor and a critic — and participant, observer, and all-round tastemaker and operator — positioned Cowley as a central player in the long-delayed rise of American literature to world stature. This wave of curious and importunate callers began to accelerate in earnest in the 1950s, as the 1920s and the figures of the Lost Generation that Cowley knew so well and wrote about so consistently were coming into academic and popular vogue. Cowley took on this burden diligently and for the most part with good humor, with the occasional irritated complaint registered. In 1978 he wrote to Allen Tate that “People come round here with tape recorders to tap, tap, tape my memories as if I were a National Scholarly Resource. The National Endowment for the Humanities ought to provide me with a secretary. I should be funded before being embalmed.” But Cowley’s cooperation with them, sometimes willing and sometimes weary, is testified to by his prominence in the pages — text, acknowledgments, endnotes, and indexes — of unnumbered biographies, cultural histories, literary studies, journal articles, and long unread graduate theses. One of the earliest of the graduate students to contact Malcolm Cowley was a twenty-one-year-old by the name of Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, who was pursuing a degree in the still new and swiftly blossoming field of American Studies at Yale. In early January 1953, he wrote to Cowley at his Sherman, Connecticut, home, hoping to arrange a meeting on the Yale campus when he was scheduled to arrive in New Haven. For a seminar that his adviser, Professor Ralph Gabriel, was teaching on twentieth-century American intellectual history, Wolfe was writing a paper on the League of American Writers and the Writers’ Congresses that it had sponsored in the 1930s and early 1940s. As he put it in his letter, “What I want to find out is what documents, minutes, or perhaps other sources there may be, bearing on the Congress and the League of American Writers, besides the speeches that were published. I figured you might be in a good position to help me out on that.” Tom Wolfe — to call him by the name the world now uses — had come to exactly the right person for his purposes. Malcolm Cowley was one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet about the League of American Writers, having been from its founding a prominent, energetic, and influential member for most of its seven-year existence. But in 1953, and for some years before and after, the League of American writers and his activities on its behalf would have been the very last thing Malcolm Cowley would have cared to talk about. His involvement with the League had been one of his most disastrous failures of political judgment in a decade full of them. It was known, even at the time, as a transparently Communist-front organization created to sway literary opinion in the direction of the Party and Soviet Union, and his reckless visibility as a Stalinist fellow traveler on its behalf — and more than a dozen other front organizations of lesser stature and duration — had come close to destroying his career. It had gotten him cashiered from his editorial post at The New Republic and reduced to mere contributor status, with serious financial consequences. Even worse, he was very publicly hounded in 1942 and forced to resign from a government position in the Office of Facts and Figures in Washington by the Dies Committee, Whittaker Chambers, and conservative attack-dog columnist Westbrook Pegler. In the postwar, his bright pink past had a tendency to rear its head whenever he was appointed as a visiting scholar at a state college, and on occasion the job offer would vanish. By the time of Wolfe’s letter Cowley had long retreated into a defensive crouch where politics was concerned, and he kept his opinions (straightforwardly liberal now) resolutely private. Wolfe did not connect with Cowley at that time, but they finally did meet two months later, when he interviewed Cowley for what would become his doctoral thesis, “The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942.” I discovered this fact in the course of writing a biographical study of Malcolm Cowley, and the connection intrigued me no end. Here was a totally unexpected name to add to Cowley’s vast association with the great and the good of twentieth-century American literature. I had followed Tom Wolfe’s exploits in journalism and latterly in fiction from his earliest days as a pioneering New Journalist in Esquire and New York magazines,
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