Malcolm Cowley
Blacklick Township, Cambria County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Born here in 1898, Cowley became an influential literary critic, editor, poet, and historian after World War I. He chronicles the "Lost Generation" in Exile's Return, his most famous work. Blue Juniata, a book of verse, celebrates this region. He was Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1966-1976. He died in Sherman, Conn. in 1989.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In a working-class stretch of Cambria County in 1898, a coal-country boy named Malcolm Cowley was born who would go on to define how America remembered its own artists. After serving in World War I, he joined the expatriate writers of the 1920s and later chronicled them in Exile's Return, giving the "Lost Generation" its enduring literary portrait. His verse in Blue Juniata carried this Pennsylvania landscape into American letters, and for a decade he led the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Why it matters
Cowley shaped the national memory of a pivotal literary generation, showing how the culture of a small Pennsylvania region could produce a critic who spoke for an entire American age.
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