[2] He attended Harvard University, but his studies were interrupted when he joined the American Field Service during World War I to drive ambulances and munitions trucks for the French army.

[5] Cowley recounted his experiences in Exile's Return, writing, "our whole training was involuntarily directed toward destroying whatever roots we had in the soil, toward eradicating our local and regional peculiarities, toward making us homeless citizens of the world".

Hemingway removed direct reference to Cowley in a later version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, replacing his name with the description, "that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement".

"[citation needed] While in Paris, Cowley found himself drawn to the avant-garde sensibilities of Dada, and also, like many other intellectuals of the period, to Marxism and its attempts to demystify the socioeconomic and political conditions that had plunged Europe into a devastating war.

[2] He travelled frequently between Paris and Greenwich Village in New York, and through these intersecting social circles came into close proximity, though he never officially joined, with the U.S. Communist Party.

In 1929, Cowley became an associate editor of the left-leaning magazine The New Republic, which he steered in "a resolutely communist direction"[8] The same year, he translated and wrote a foreword to the 1913 French novel 'La Colline Inspirée', by Maurice Barrès.

In 1932, he joined Edmund Wilson, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Waldo Frank as union-sponsored observers of the miners' strikes in Kentucky.

Cowley was appointed Vice President, and over the next few years became involved in numerous campaigns, including attempts to persuade the United States government to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.

This decision resulted in anti-communist journalists such as Whittaker Chambers and Westbrook Pegler publicly exposing Cowley's left-wing sympathies.

"Don't you think it would be a good thing if all investigators could be made to understand that Liberalism is not only not a crime but actually the attitude of the President of the United States and the greater part of his Administration?

In 1944, having been more or less silenced politically, Cowley began a career as a literary advisor, editor, and talent scout at Viking Press.

Literary critic Mark McGurl argues that Hemingway's tip-of-the-iceberg style has become one of the most emulated in twentieth-century American prose, his name all but synonymous with the "pathos of understatement" and "the value of craft as represented by the practice of multiple revision".

Cowley again argued for a dramatic revaluation of Faulkner's position in American letters, enlisting him as an honorary member of the Lost Generation.

These were followed by Black Cargoes, A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1962), Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age (1966), Think Back on Us (1967), Collected Poems (1968), Lesson of the Masters (1971) and A Second Flowering (1973).

Among his students were Larry McMurtry, Peter S. Beagle, Wendell Berry, as well as Ken Kesey, whose One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) Cowley helped publish at Viking.

Cowley taught also at Yale, Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, California at Irvine and Berkeley, and even the prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, among other places, but he seldom maintained a full-time teaching appointment.

Literary and cultural critic Benjamin Kirbach argues that this flitting back-and-forth between universities and the publishing industry allowed Cowley to reconcile his cosmopolitan ideal within the constraints of the academy.

Kirbach writes: "Cowley's itinerancy—his seemingly effortless movement between universities and the publishing industry, between writers individual and collective—played a crucial role in institutionalizing [literary] modernism" in the twentieth century.

Poet, critic, Boswell of the Lost Generation of which he himself was a member, savior of Faulkner's dwindling reputation, editor of Kerouac's On the Road, discoverer of John Cheever, Cowley knew everybody and wrote about them with sharp insight.