James Gould Cozzens

James Gould Cozzens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer who explored the lives and mores of America’s upper-class establishment in the mid-twentieth century, was born in Chicago on August 19, 1903. His parents were both descended from distinguished New England families, and Cozzens enjoyed a privileged upbringing in the exclusive enclave of St. Austin’s Place on Staten Island, New York. Educated at Kent School, a progressive Episcopal preparatory school in Connecticut, he decided at an early age to become a writer. His first published work, an essay entitled “A Democratic School” that defended the Kent curriculum, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly when he was only sixteen. Cozzens entered Harvard in 1922 and finished Confusion (1924), a first novel about shimmering youth caught in the undertow of thejazz Age, during his sophomore year. Afterward he withdrew from Harvard and moved to New Brunswick, Canada. There he wrote Michael Scarlett { 1925), a historical romance set in Elizabethan England. Following stays in Cuba and Europe, Cozzens returned to New York City. In 1927 he married his literary agent, Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten and in quick succession completed two more apprentice novels, Cock Pit (1928) and The Son of Perdition (1929), both unlikely tales of tropic adventure drawn on his experiences in Cuba.

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Cozzens regarded S.S. San Pedro (1931) as his first mature work. Based on a true-life sea disaster, the novella details the unaccountable sinking of a passenger freighter bound for South America and probes the dissolution of authority underlying the tragedy A selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, it earned the praise of critics, who compared Cozzens to Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane. The Last Adam, published in 1933, introduced a Cozzens specialty, the so-called “professional” novel, which examines characters in terms of their vocations and their effect on communities. A memorable portrait of a crusty New England doctor, who is at once an establishment figure and an outsider in a small Connecticut town, The Last Adam was made into the movie Doctor Bull (1933), starring Will Rogers.

In the spring of 1933 Cozzens and his wife moved to a farm near Lambertville, New Jersey, where he lived in virtual seclusion, dedicating himself solely to fiction. Castaway (1934), a modern-day reversal of Robinson Crusoe, is his one experimental work. Essentially a fable, it depicts a man who is unable to survive alone amid the abundance of a big-city department store. During this period Cozzens also sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. “Total Stranger” won the O. Henry Memorial Award for the best story of 1936. Men and Brethren (1936), his next professional novel, features a tough-minded Episcopal minister, who embodies the Cozzens concept of duty as vicar of a parish chapel in a New York slum. In the highly autobiographical Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), Cozzens called on his experiences as a tutor in Europe for a crisply satiric self-portrait, complete with a characteristic blast at American expatriates. The Just and the Unjust (1942), which covers three days of a murder trial in a small town, microscopically exposes the limitations and occasional triumphs of the American legal system.

Guard of Honor, generally regarded as Cozzens’s finest achievement, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction after it appeared in 1948. Based on detailed diaries he kept during service in World War II, it examines three transfiguring days in the career of a young general in confronting a problem of racial discrimination at an army airbase in Florida in September 1943. Massive in its scope, uncompromisingly realistic and unsentimental, the novel balances a huge cast of intri-

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cately enmeshed characters, and rises to a climax so dramatic that—in spite of not a shot being fired in anger—its final pages have the healing effect of peace after battle. As Brendan Gill observed in The New Yorker: “Every page of Guard of Honorg ives the impression of a writer at the very top of his powers setting out to accomplish nothing less than his masterwork.” “No other American novelist of our time writes with such profound understanding of the wellsprings of human character and of the social pressures that help to form it,” said Orville Prescott in The New York Times.

Cozzens scored his greatest commercial success with By Love Possessed (1957), which earned him the prestigious William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1960. A numbered one bestseller, the novel probes the themes of love, passion, and reason in a story that follows a lawyer as he prepares to defend a young man falsely accused of rape. “ By Love Possessed is a masterpiece,” wrote Brendan Gill in The New Yorker. “No American novelist of the twentieth century has attempted more than Mr. Cozzens attempts in the

course of this long and bold and delicate book No other American

novelist of this century could bring to such a task the resources of intelligence, literary technique, and knowledge of the intricate ways of the world that Mr. Cozzens commands.” In a major cover story, Time magazine noted: “Cozzens resembles no one now writing, but his genre is that of George Eliot and Joseph Conrad—the novel of moral choice resolved by force of character.... With each book he has grown in craft, in insight, in authority.”

Cozzens’s output diminished in the last years of his life. Children and Others ; a volume of short stories, appeared in 1964. Morning Noon and Night (1968), his last novel, endures as a final memoir of upper-middle-class American society. “The people so shrewdly drawn in these slow, reflective pages represent the class that up to very recently has owned most of, and operated all of, America,” observed Clifton Fadiman in the Book-of-the-Month Club News. “Mr. Cozzens is a kind of Sargent of contemporary American fiction.” Just Representations: A James Gould Cozzens Reader, an omnibus collection of the author’s life-work, appeared shortly after his death on August 9, 1978.

“No other serious American writer, except John O’Hara with

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whom Cozzens shares some concerns, but whose purpose was always somewhat different, has succeeded in dealing so effectively and seriously with the class and group of people ... who have in fact and for better and worse most profoundly influenced American life in this century,” wrote George Garrett. “Cozzens offers a superior example of the integrity of the craft [of fiction], of the daring refinement of language, of the creation of fully realized characters who matter, of structure's and patterns of experience which seem, in the major novels, to shadow the complex patterns of Fortune and Providence in our lives.” As Bernard De Voto stated: “James Gould Cozzens has one of the finest talents and one of the most expert skills at work in American fiction. . . . He is not a literary man, he is a writer. There are a handful like him in every age. Later on it turns out that they were the ones who wrote that age’s literature.”