Shaping opinions on books

 Gerald Howard said this about Malcolm Cowley: 

Cowley stood in relation to books in the ’30s much the way Pauline Kael did to films in The New Yorker in the ’70s: It was a requirement in intellectual circles that you have an opinion about his opinion.

 

That much influence in one voice seems unhealthy to me. To me, criticism is best when there are  a lot of different opinions.

But I am interested in how the public’s tastes are formed. I’d love to understand how some writers become part of the canon and others remain outside.

At one time there was such a person as a woman or man of letters, whose talk about literature helped a lot of people find their next book. (I would think of Virginia Woolf before I’d think of Cowley.) It’s an interesting role.

• Source: The quotation is from Dwight Garner’s “American Literature Owes a Great Debt to This 20^th-Century ‘Insider’”; The New York Times, Nov. 10, 2025. It’s a review of Gerald Howard’s The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature; London: Penguin, 2025