redrobinbookreviews

Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s    Malcolm Cowley
Another volume on “the lost generation,” this one much more personal and impressionistic than Flowering. Really liked the brief essays on Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, and their influences on the lost generation, and the depictions of Joyce. Very interesting social history as well as literary, Cowley captures an American generation’s development as well as their literary ambitions and accomplishments. Excellent depiction of the growing corporatization of American life in the 20s. Harry Crosby’s life and death was the perfect example of the generation, as Cowley says. Very good, very well written.