James Gould Cozzens

About the James Gould Cozzens

James Gould Cozzenswas 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. 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 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.

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.