Background

James Gould Cozzens was born on August 19, 1903 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the only child of Mary Bertha Wood and Henry William Cozzens. His father sold printing equipment. He grew up in the borough of Staten Island in New York City.

Education

In 1922 he graduated from the Kent School in Connecticut. He attended Harvard University for two years and in the spring of 1924 took a leave of absence, never to return.

Career

In 1924 he published Confusion, a novel he had completed while a freshman at Harvard. The title was based on a passage from Marcus Aurelius, and the setting was France and North Africa.

From 1925 to 1926, Cozzens taught in Cuba, where he accumulated background for some of his later fiction.

In August 1926, Cozzens accompanied his mother to France and for one year worked as a tutor. While there he wrote "The Minor Catholicon" and began "The Careless Livery, " both unpublished. Upon returning to the United States, he served for a short period as a librarian at the New York Athletic Club.

Cock Pit (1928), the first of Cozzens's novels set in Latin America, was a financial and literary success. It was followed by The Son of Perdition (1928). S. S. San Pedro (1931), a novelette about ships and the sea, drew some comparisons to the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane. In 1944, William McFee included it in his anthology World's Great Tales of the Sea.

In the 1930's, Cozzens published a large number of short stories and essays as well as several complex novels, nearly all of them focusing on professional men. In the Last Adam (1933), the protagonist is a physician; Men and Brethren (1936) deals with an Episcopal minister. In these novels his heroes are upper class, conservative, and admirable, but susceptible to human frailties. The Last Adam, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, established him as an important writer. The title is drawn from the writings of St. Paul, who describes Christ as the last Adam. There is nothing Christlike, however, about the novel's central figure, Dr. Bull, a cynical, less than competent practitioner who attempts to control a typhoid epidemic in a small New England town. Men and Brethren brought Cozzens critical praise for undertaking the difficult task of describing a religious figure who combines Christian spirituality with a realistic view of his environment.

In 1940, Cozzens produced Ask Me Tomorrow, a short autobiographical novel about his years in Europe. Through the Just and the Unjust (1942), based on a New Jersey murder trial, Cozzens reached a much larger audience; more than 250, 000 copies of the work were sold. The Harvard Law Review called it a fine fictional account of the daily life of lawyers and recommended that it be made required reading for law students.

During World War II, Cozzens was a writer in the Army Air Corps and was discharged with the rank of major in October 1945. Diaries he kept during this period provided material for Guard of Honor (1948), the story of a young general faced with a case of racial discrimination.

His most important and popular book By Love Possessed (1957) covers two traumatic days in the life of Arthur Winner, Jr. , a middleaged lawyer who has an almost Victorian sense of noblesse oblige but at times buckles under the moral testing he is obliged to endure. Critical praise included suggestions that Cozzens deserved the Nobel Prize for literature and that By Love Possessed was the most important novel in years. Some critics dissented. The National Review cited the work's consistent anti-Catholic bias, and Dwight Macdonald wrote, "Such reviews, such enthusiasm, such unanimity, such nonsense!" He believed that Cozzens had received undue attention because he had not been sufficiently praised for his earlier works.

In Children and Others (1964), Cozzens brought together seventeen short stories, two of which had not been previously published. It enjoyed a reasonably good popular and critical reception.

Cozzens's last novel, Morning, Noon and Night (1968), received scattered and generally hostile reviews. Despite the popular recognition that came with By Love Possessed, Cozzens refused to become a public figure. He declined to participate in literary tours or to give radio or television interviews. Living in the rural New Jersey countryside at Lambertville, and later at Williamstown, Massachussets, he confessed to enjoying the life of a semi-recluse. When it was reported that he had not attended a play or concert in over two decades, he was asked how he could write about life and people with so little contact. He replied, "The thing you have to know about yourself, is you are people. "

Cozzens died of pneumonia in Stuart, Florida. His literary reputation continues to be debatable. Yet within a decade after his death, Cozzens was little read.

Achievements

• His novel Guard of Honor won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize. Cozzens's most important and popular work was By Love Possessed (1957), which sold some 6 million copies and won the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Just and the Unjust

    ( In The Just and the Unjust, Pulitzer Prize-winning auth...)

  • Guard of Honor

    ( Guard of Honor is a neglected masterpiece that stands c...)

  • Just Representations: A James Gould Cozzens Reader

    (This collection, marking the author's seventy-fifth birth...)

  • Men and Brethren

    (The Reverend Ernest Cudlipp, almost 45, urbane and intell...)

  • By Love Possessed

    (A highly-respected, middle-aged lawyer's involvements wit...)

  • Castaway

    (An unspecified catastrophe has overtaken New York. Mr. Le...)

  • The Last Adam

    (Very Good. First edition bound in black cloth with woodcu...)

Views

He believed his fiction to be a "just representation" of what people endure and that he had no thesis except that "people get a very raw deal from life. "

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Since 1924 Mr. Cozzens has stayed home and written novels. His works have a distinction that makes some of William Faulkner's work look amateurish. " (Matthew Bruccoli)

Connections

On December 31, 1927, he married Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten, a literary agent. They had no children.

Father:

Henry William Cozzens

Mother:

Mary Bertha Wood

Spouse:

Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten

literary agent

References

• James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart