Malcolm Cowley (August 28, 1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.

Born August 28, 1898 in Western Pennsylvania, Cowley grew up in Pittsburgh, where his father William was a homeopathic doctor. He graduated from Peabody High School where his friend Kenneth Burke was also a student. in 1920 he earned a B.A. from Harvard University.^{[citation needed]}

He interrupted his undergraduate studies to join the American Field Service in France during World War I. From the Western Front he reported on the war for The Pittsburgh Gazette (today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).^{[citation needed]}

Upon returning to the USA, Cowley married artist Peggy Baird; they were divorced in 1931. His second wife was Muriel Maurer. Together they had one son, Robert William Cowley, who is an editor and military historian.^{[citation needed]}

As one of the dozens of creative literary and artistic figures who migrated during the 1920s to Paris, France and congregated in Montparnasse, Cowley returned to live in France for three years, where he worked with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell, Harry Crosby, Caresse Crosby and others. He is usually regarded as representative of America's Lost Generation. 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". John Dos Passos's private correspondence revealed the contempt he held for Cowley, but also the care writers took to hide their personal feelings in order to protect their own careers when Cowley became assistant editor of The New Republic. From his two decades of struggling, he (along with Edmund Wilson) later became a well-known chronicler of the expatriate generation.^{[citation needed]}