If it seems strange that anyone ever needed to make such a claim, that’s a mark of how well Cowley and others of his era succeeded in their mission. Notable poets and novelists led the way. Scholars were close behind, among them the Harvard professor F. O. Matthiessen, whose American Renaissance (1941) established a canon that is still a basis for study. In between was the “man of letters,” a phrase that now sounds “cobwebby and antique,” Gerald Howard writes in The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature. But Cowley was on the cutting edge in his own time, as the biography vividly shows, focusing on his public rather than private life. Howard goes further: Cowley’s approach to American literature remains as important as ever to helping it thrive.