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 WWII race novel Guard of Honor, which more than one critic considered one of the most important accounts of the war. 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 middle- 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. 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.
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. As sometimes happened with his prose, this style did not translate well into print, and the results were further distorted because the information seemed to be gathered by one reporter but the article written by someone different.
As a result, sales of all his books suffered, and Cozzens has become virtually unknown to the general public; he remains, however, fairly well known among those familiar with the literary criticism of George Steiner John Derbyshire and Matthew Bruccoli,
Cozzens was a critic of modernism, and of realism more leftist than his own, and he was quoted in a featured article in Time as saying (perhaps somewhat in jest), "I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up."