Malcolm Cowley was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist. Cowley is also recognized as one of the major literary historians of the twentieth century, and his Exile's Return, is one of the most definitive and widely read chronicles of the 1920s.

Cowley was one of the dozens of creative literary and artistic figures who migrated during the 1920s to Paris and congregated in Montparnasse. He lived in France for three years, where he worked with notables such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings and others. He is usually regarded as representative of America's Lost Generation.

As a consulting editor for Viking Press, Cowley notably championed the work and advanced the careers of the post-World War I writers who sundered tradition and fostered a new era in American literature. He was the one who rescued writers such as William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald from possible early oblivion and who discovered John Cheever and goaded him to write. Later Cowley championed such uncommon writers as Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey

His extraordinarily creative and prolific writing career spanned nearly 70 years, and he continued to produce essays, reviews and books well into his 80's.