Gerald Howard, retired Executive Editor and Vice president of Doubleday Books, is a recipient of the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction and is a distinguished role model for literary agents and editors of the American publishing industry. But he has not just been a great fiction
editor—working with such writers as Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace, Debby Applegate, Hanya Yanagihara, Pat Barker, Sean Wilentz, and Bill Bryson—he also is regarded as one of the publishing industry’s finest editors of non-fiction and has received the Biographers International Organization’s Editorial Excellence Award, presented annually to an outstanding editor of biography.
He began his career in 1972 as a copywriter for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and during his following tenure at Viking Penguin, Norton, and then Doubleday, he acquired and published biographies on an extraordinary range of subjects from Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Frank Sinatra, Maurice Sendak, Luciano Pavarotti, and Joan of Arc, to lesser-known figures such as Iceberg Slim, Lester Bangs, Harold Hayes, and homicide detective Dave Carbone. His essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, Tin House, American Scholar, London Review of Books, n+1, Salon, and other publications.
In his riveting new book, The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, Howard makes a strong claim for Cowley as a crucial catalyst for the efflorescence of American fiction in the years following World War I. He’s not wrong: Working as a critic, author, essayist and editor, Cowley often provided a lone voice in the wilderness for neglected masters. As consulting editor for the publishing house Viking Press in the 1940s, Cowley resuscitated William Faulkner’s career at a time when most of his books were out of print. Gerald Howard explains:
There was something going on in Europe at the time that was somewhat disconnected from what was going on in the
United States. Faulkner’s reputation in France in particular was very high: Andre Gide and Sartre were admirers. But in the
United States, Faulkner didn’t sell, he had a very mixed reputation, and he was not well understood. Cowley first wrote a very long essay about Faulkner’s work, which was serialized in various publications, and then assembled The Portable Faulkner for Viking, which sold well. So the ground was prepared by Cowley….This was one of the most important rescue missions in American literary history, comparable perhaps only to the rediscovery of Herman Melville’s work in the early 20th century after decades of obscurity and neglect, And happily, Faulkner was alive and able to enjoy the fruits of rediscovery.
It helped that Cowley had the inside track with important critics like Edmond Wilson because he was Editor of The New Republic from 1929 to 1944.
To Read the New York Times Review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/books/review/gerald-howard-malcolm-cowley.html
Cowley and Kerouac
In addition to generating a new, successful profile for Faulkner, Cowley ensured the survival of the literary careers of other important authors, ushering in Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel of the Beat Generation, On the Road, for instance, working for seven years to get it published and finally succeeding in 1957. Cowley also put John Cheever on the road to success.
Of interest is Gerald Howard’s essay on Cowley and Jack Kerouac.
theamericanscholar.org/scrolling-through/