Background

Robert William Cowley was born on December 16, 1934, in New York City, to Malcolm and Muriel (Maurer) Cowley.

Education

In 1956, Cowley received a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University.

Career

From 1956 to 1964, Cowley was an associate editor at the American Heritage, and then he worked as a managing editor at the Sky. From 1965 to 1966, Robert worked as an assistant editor at The Reporter. From 1966 to 1972, he also was an articles editor, and then became a managing editor at The Horizon. Cowley also worked as a co-editor at the Saturday Review of the Arts, and then, from 1973 to 1977, he was a senior editor at the Houghton Mifflin.

From 1977 to 1984, he became a senior editor at Random House, and then at Henry Holt. Cowley was a founding editor of the MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, and then became an editor-in-chief. From 2004 to 2006, he held the position of consultant at the Smithsonian Books.

Achievements

• Robert William Cowley founded MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History in 1988, after a long career as editor with a number of magazines and publishing houses, and his Experience of War culls fifty-one essays from the pages of that journal. Cowley and Ohio State professor Geoffrey Parker edited The Reader's Companion to Military History, drawing on the knowledge and contributions of military historians. Cowley also assembled a collections of essays by more than thirty military historians, novelists, and journalists who present their counterfactual suppositions of how outcomes might have been different in What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Reader's Companion to Military History

    (An encyclopedia of military history covers the wars of As...)

    1996
  • Experience of War: An Anthology of Articles from Mhq : The Quarterly Journal of Military History

    (A collection of current writing in the field of military ...)

    1992
  • West Point: Two Centuries of Honor and Tradition

    (Published in conjunction with the Academy's bicentennial,...)

    2002
  • No End Save Victory Vol. 1: Perspectives on World War II

    (Stephen Ambrose tells the miraculous story of how a singl...)

    2002
  • What If?: The World's Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

    (With its in-depth reflections on the monumental events of...)

    2000
  • The Cold War: A Military History

    (Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is s...)

    2009
  • The Great War: Perspectives on the First World War

    (The great war - or the First World War, as most Americans...)

    2003
  • 1918: Gamble For Victory The Greatest Attack of World War I

    (A description of the last major offensive of WWI includin...)

    1964
  • With My Face to the Enemy: A Civil War Anthology

    (The lawyer-historian Alan T. Nolan called the Civil War o...)

    2002
  • The Collected What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been 2006
  • The Rulers of Britain 1982

Membership

Cowley was a member of the Society of Military History.

Interests

• Jazz collecting, military archaeology

• Sport & Clubs

  skiing

Connections

Cowley was married to Blair Phillips, but they divorced and Robert married Edith Pray Lorillard on June 24, 1978. Cowley has two children from his first marriage - Elizabeth Blair Roberts and Miranda Phillips Heller, and two from the second - Olivia Lorillard Wassenaar and Savannah Caroline Lorillard.

Father:

Malcolm Cowley

Mother:

Muriel (Maurer) Cowley

Daughter:

Savannah Caroline Lorillard Cowley

Daughter:

Olivia Lorillard Wassenaar Cowley

Daughter:

Elizabeth Blair Roberts Cowley

Daughter:

Miranda Phillips Heller Cowley

ex-wife:

Blair Phillips

Wife:

Edith Pray Lorillard