In the prologue to his 1951 revision of Exile's Return, Malcolm Cowley (Figure 1) described the first edition of 1934 as “the story of the lost generation” written “while its adventures were still fresh in my mind.”He then added, “since I had shared in many of the adventures I planned to tell a little of my own story, but only as an illustration of what had happened to others.” In fact, this modest description of his method drastically understates the importance of Cowley's own life in the originalstory. In the first edition, he does combine stretches of narrative about his own life — including chapters on his childhood, high-school and college years, exile in Europe, disillusionment with bohemian life, and political conversion — with a narrative of the generation's coming of age. But even the story ofthe collective self that he means to tell — beginning with their early innocence ina pastoral, Edenic America; continuing through their exile and refuge in the religion of art and the subculture of bohemianism; and ending with their final repatriation and salvation via the political and historical insights of Marxism — is in every important respect simply his own writ large. It is a story in which the personal, individualized “I” of conventional autobiography is transformed into a collective “we.”