Murray and Rosa met Malcolm Cowley when he was brought,
amidst much furor over his past left-wing politics and putative dirty poetry, to
be a visiting professor at the University of Washington for winter quarter of
1950. Cowley asked for a local guide, and Murray, who was teaching part-time at
the College of Puget Sound (now UPS), literally moonlighting as a bridge tender
in Tacoma, and working on Skid Road, took the job.
Cowley liked Murray and liked the Northwest. In 1956, soon
after taking a position at Stanford, he wrote to his friend Kenneth Burke that
the people in Palo Alto "are nice but not so amusing as those in Seattle.
They don't drink or talk so much and keep an eye on academic advancement,
whereas the Seattle people had almost abandoned hope or fear." (Two years
later, Ken Kesey showed up as a student, and Cowley no longer had to worry
about being amused.)
Murray credited Cowley with showing him how to turn his journalistic
skills to book-length history, and Cowley was eager to see more of his writing
on Northwest topics. Within a week of the publication of "Skid Road," Cowley was
encouraging him on another project, and providing its name.
 |
| Malcolm Cowley, circa 1950 Credit: (©CORBIS/Bettmann) |
...The book on the Olympic Peninsula sounds like an awfully
good one and you must get to work on it by all means. ... The problem is that a
geographical book about the Olympic Peninsula would have a necessarily restricted
audience. What had to be done is to find some approach or emphasis that makes
the audience larger. ...
Maybe a title like "The
Last Wilderness" would help. It is an old title but there is no book
by that name now in print -- and it would give you an excuse for presenting the
Olympic Peninsula as, in a way, representing other wildernesses that have
disappeared -- this one may or may not have a happier fortune -- and your book
could discuss the forces and people working to destroy it or save it ...
Meanwhile what most impresses me about it is your enthusiasm
and your knowledge of the subject. It should be an even richer book than SKID
ROAD.
...
As ever,
Malcolm
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