In his next act, Cowley chaperoned two counterculturists into the club. In a delicate yearslong dance, in 1957 Cowley persuaded Viking to take a chance on the seemingly formless and definitely obscene travelogue On the Road, by a vagabond named Jack Kerouac, which Howard counts as Cowley’s most significant achievement. Five years later, he plucked one of his students in the new MFA program at Stanford out of obscurity, and made Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest an “immediate hit” and Kesey “a genuine literary star.” Kerouac and Kesey “were as influential in defining the culture of the sixties as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were in the twenties,” Howard concludes. And, I would add, Cowley’s work as a “literary bureaucrat” had an immeasurable effect on the reputations of all four, with Faulkner thrown in as a chaser.

The generation that followed Cowley would preside over an extraordinary flowering of American literature, often invigorated by talented and entrepreneurial figures from the margins, which a number of recent studies have joined Howard in documenting. Shut out of publishing until the early twentieth century, Jewish bookmen like Alfred A. Knopf, Ben Huebsch, and Horace Liveright had to start their own firms and take chances on untested new writers. The bets, both financial and literary, paid off, and in The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature, Josh Lambert details how next-generation Jewish editors like Jason Epstein and Robert Gottlieb became such heavyweights in postwar book culture that critic Richard Kostelanetz, in 1974, credited them with having “unprecedented power to determine what writing might be taken seriously and what would be neglected or wiped out.”

Earlier accounts of this era have tended to overlook the work of women writers and editors. Fortunately, this is changing. In The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, Amy Reading details White’s editing of John Cheever, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, and other giants of the golden age. But its greater interest is in the women she encouraged, such as Janet Flanner and Kay Boyle, whom she helped reach the kind of broad audience that trade publishing denied them. White even rescued Elizabeth Bishop from the slush pile: Her predecessor as poetry editor, Charles Pearce, had rejected 13 consecutive poems, and upon taking up her new position in 1945, a horrified White had to “engag[e] in relationship repair” to persuade Bishop to send in more work. Knopf’s Judith Jones is best known for bringing Julia Child and Anne Frank to the world, but in The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, Sara Franklin shows that Jones had a sharp ear for poetry as well, cultivating Sharon Olds and snapping up Sylvia Plath’s first collection, The Colossus—although she inexplicably turned down The Bell Jar, one of the most reliable sellers of postwar American literature. No editor can get everything right.