During the 1930 s, one of the liveliest decades in the history of the American mind, Malcolm Cowley was literary editor of the New Republic, the magazine that served more than any other as the intellectual conscience of a generation. The impressive collection of essays and reviews of this gifted commentator from that period is a kind of topical chronicle of the era. From hundreds of reviews and essays, Henry Dan Piper has selected and arranged these articles to offer a source book of readings in the epoch s intellectual, social, and literary history.

The volume...