The critic and editor Malcolm Cowley had a record as a literary-talent spotter that was unmatched in the American Century. At The New Republic in 1930, where he’d recently become the literary editor at 32, he published “Expelled,” the first short story by a then-teenage John Cheever to appear in a national magazine (one that didn’t usually publish fiction). A few years later, Cowley gave a second teenager his start in reviewing: a Brooklyn boy named Alfred Kazin. In the 1940s, at the Viking