Today New York City is universally recognized, if not always universally embraced, as the literary capital of the United States. It was not always so. Almost until the First World War, there was no single dominant metropolitan cultural center. Ezra Pound emphasized this fact in 1913 when he observed from London that "America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation, for no nation can be considered historically as such until it has achieved within itself a city to which all roads lead, and from which there goes out an authority." He did not foresee that New York was then on the verge of assuming the role of intellectual and cultural beacon for the nation. The same year that Pound declared America devoid of a cultural center, the path-breaking Armory Show opened in Manhattan, and within a decade the city had become the "seat and shire" of American artistic life. By the 1920's all cultural roads did indeed point to New York, and, to hear the editors of New York magazines tell it, all the lastest ideas emanated from it as well. The New Republic's Edmund Wilson boasted in 1926 after returning from New Orleans that "though we so much lack charm, and though we live so much less agreeably than others, we have the satisfaction of believing that we are the bearers of the latest news."

Perhaps as much as any other literary intellectual during the interwar years, Malcolm Cowley was in the midst of New York's self-conscious emergence as the nation's cultural and intellectual hub. First as an editor of the short-lived transatlantic review Broom during the early 1920's, and later as literary editor of the New Republic throughout the 1930's,