His later years had two unexpected triumphs: He published Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). The story of these two countercultural classics creates the great digression and longest chapter in Howard’s biography in which Cowley is just a supporting character. The change of focus would be annoying if the chapter weren’t so entertaining, especially in Kerouac’s case. Howard knows every detail of On the Road’s slow and weird path to the best-seller list and enduring success as the signature novel of the Beat movement.
FROM
The Last of the Lost Generation | Portico
Cowley died in 1989 at the age of ninety. By then, he had received nearly every honor to which a literary critic might aspire, including the presidency of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He had outlived his major contemporaries. Fitzgerald had died at forty-four, Hemingway at sixty-one, Faulkner at sixty-four, Cummings at sixty-seven. (Hart Crane had killed himself at thirty-two.) Cowley published eight new books after reaching seventy, most notably –And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade (1978). He could never fully understand his political mistakes, even after writing a book about the period, The Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980), but his accomplishments overshadowed his blunders. Fitzgerald said there were “no second acts in American lives,” but Cowley managed three—adventurous young writer, duped idealist, and grand old man of American letters. It was characteristically nice of him to give us a happy ending.
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