詹姆斯·古德·科森斯

James Gould Cozzens (August 19, 1903 – August 9, 1978) was a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer whose work enjoyed an unusual degree of popular success and critical acclaim for more than three decades. His 1949 Pulitzer win was for the World War II race novel Guard of Honor, which more than one critic considered one of the most important accounts of the war. His 1957 Pulitzer nomination was for the best-selling novel By Love Possessed, which was later made into a popular 1961 film.

Culturally conservative critics' widespread acclaim for By Love Possessed, along with a controversial 1957 interview that Cozzens gave to Time, led to an aggressive backlash by author Irving Howe in the New Republic and avant-garde critic Dwight Macdonald in Commentary. Macdonald's essay is still considered "the most persuasively devastating review of the century" more than fifty years later. The criticism, aimed as much at critics catering to a middlebrow- rather than highbrow sensibility as the author himself, did extensive damage to Cozzens' reputation, both during the last 20 years of his life, and posthumously.

In recent years, there have been multiple attempts at resuscitating Cozzens' place in the literary pantheon. D.G. Myers called him "perhaps America's best forgotten novelist." Writer Joseph Epstein has offered similar praise, both in an essay for Commentary magazine, as well as in a chapter for his book Plausible Prejudices. The late biographer and academic editor Matthew J. Bruccoli extended those efforts in a biography and related scholarly work. There has also been recent interest in screenplays based on his work: in 2018, the Hollywood Reporter reported that the rights to Sam Peckinpah's screenplay Castaway, based on Cozzens' novella, had been acquired by a producer.

Writing

Cozzens published his first novel Confusion, in 1924 while still a student at Harvard. A few months later, ill and in debt, he withdrew from school and moved to New Brunswick, where he wrote Michael Scarlett, a second novel. Neither book sold well or was widely read, and to sustain himself, Cozzens traveled to Cuba to teach children of American residents, which is where he began to write short stories and gather material for the novels Cock Pit (1928) and The Son of Perdition (1929).

He met Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten, a literary agent with Brandt & Kirkpatrick, whom he married at city hall in New York City on December 27, 1927, and who successfully edited and marketed his books. Except for military service during World War II, the Cozzenses lived in semi-seclusion near Lambertville, New Jersey, and shied away from all but local contact. Other early novels include S.S. San Pedro (1931) which won the Scribner's Prize, The Last Adam (1933), and Castaway (1934).

During World War II, Cozzens served in the U.S. Army Air Forces, at first updating manuals, then in the USAAF Office of Information Services, a liaison and "information clearinghouse" between the military and the civilian press. One of the functions of his office was in controlling news, and it became Cozzens's job to defuse situations potentially embarrassing to Gen. Henry H. Arnold, the chief of the Army Air Forces. In the course of his job, he became arguably the best informed officer of any rank and service in the U.S., and he had achieved the rank of major by the time he was discharged at the end of the war. These experiences formed the basis of his 1948 novel Guard of Honor, which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize.

His 1957 novel By Love Possessed became a surprise success, with 34 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, rating #1 on September 22, 1957, three weeks after its release. It was also the top-selling novel of 1957. The novel was also very loosely adapted into a movie in 1961. By that time, however, a hostile review of the novel which Dwight Macdonald wrote for Commentary Magazine had already effectively ruined Cozzens's literary career, and few of his later works either received similar critical acclaim or achieved comparable best-seller status. His last novel, Morning, Noon and Night, was published in 1968, but sold poorly.

Throughout his life, Cozzens maintained extensive correspondence, with several literary figures, including American writers Carlos Baker, Saul Bellow, Erskine Caldwell, Granville Hicks, Oliver La Farge, John O'Hara, as well as the publisher William Jovanovich, and academic author-editor and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli.

Style and themes

Philosophical in nature, his novels take place during the course of just a few days, exhibit little action, and explore a variety of concepts such as love, duty, racial sensitivities, and the law. Cozzens' novels disregarded modernist literary trends, and are characterized by the use of often unfamiliar, archaic words, traditional literary structures, and conservative themes. As a result, many contemporary critics regarded his work as old-fashioned or moralistic, and he was viciously attacked as a reactionary by his harshest critics.

His prose is crafted meticulously and has an objective, clinical tone and subtle, dry humor. His work is at times complex, using multi-level layering and double voicing as narrative techniques for expressing viewpoint. The main characters of his books are primarily professional, middle-class white men — assistant district attorney Abner Coates in The Just and the Unjust, doctor George Bull in The Last Adam, Episcopal priest Ernest Cudlipp in Men and Brethren, Col. Norman Ross in Guard of Honor, and lawyer Arthur Winner in By Love Possessed, for example — who confront issues such as duty and ethics in their careers while attempting to reconcile these principles with the emotional demands of their personal lives, usually by compromising their principles. In almost every instance, they are based on persons he observed in his own experience.