Book Event: Gerry Howard with Edwin Frank

Book Launch: Gerry Howard presents The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature

In conversation with Edwin Frank

Wine reception to follow

Gerry Howard, former executive editor and vice president of Doubleday Books, launches The Insider, a delightful and majestic reckoning with the ascent of American fiction in the twentieth century through the prism of the little-known man who had an astonishing amount to do with it. Malcolm Cowley is not a household name today, but the American literary canon would look very different without him; a prototypical “man of letters” of his generation, he became one of the few truly influential critics of the 1920s and ’30s. In The Insider, Howard gives an intimate accounting of Cowley's fascinating and multifaceted career and uses that career to tell a much bigger story of how American literature took the course that it did from the 1920s to the 1960s: the story of an art form, and an industry, and a country experiencing wrenching change. Edwin Frank, founder and editor of the NYRB Classics series and the editorial director of New York Review Books, joins Howard for a reading and discussion, before an audience Q&A.