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.