A finalist for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in NonfictionA delightful and majestic reckoning with the ascent of American fiction in the twentieth century through the prism of the under-known man who had an astonishing amount to do with itMalcolm Cowley is not a household name today, but the American literary canon would look very different without him. A prototypical “man of letters” of his generation—Harvard University, a volunteer in the French ambulance corps in World War I, a rite of passage in Paris after the war—he became one of the few truly influential critics of the 1920s and ’30s, along with his close New Republic colleague Edmund Wilson. Cowley’s early support of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and their set—and indeed for framing this group in generational terms in the first place—secured his place in literary history.Most people are lucky to be part of a single game-changing era in their...