Malcolm Cowley - Life in Paris

Life in Paris

As one of the dozens of creative literary and artistic figures who migrated during the 1920s to Paris, France and congregated in Montparnasse, Cowley returned to live in France for three years, where he worked with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell, Harry Crosby, Caresse Crosby and others. He is usually regarded as representative of America's Lost Generation. Hemingway removed direct reference to Cowley in a later version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, replacing his name with the description, "that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement". John Dos Passos's private correspondence revealed the contempt he held for Cowley, but also the care writers took to hide their personal feelings in order to protect their own careers when Cowley became assistant editor of The New Republic. From his two decades of struggling, he (along with Edmund Wilson) later became a well-known chronicler of the expatriate generation.