James Gould Cozzens
| 
James Gould Cozzens, Bookcover, A Life Apart, by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York, 1983
| | |
FICTION WRITER
BORN: August 19, 1903, Chicago, Illinois
DIED: August 9, 1978, Stuart, Florida
What I want to do is present stuff in the form of true experience, the happenings of living life as I have found them to happen.
Acclaimed for his novels and short stories, author James Gould Cozzens wrote about moral duty and the search for values in a style of exacting realism. In his commitment to writing truthfully from experience, Cozzens sought out new places, people, and occupations, traveling throughout the Caribbean and Europe. His military service during World War II provided him with material for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Guard of Honor (1948), which concerned a young general's dilemma when confronted by racial discrimination. His bestseller, By Love Possessed (1957), drew upon his experience in the Bucks County-Lambertville area, where he spent a great deal of time researching the legal profession. Cozzens' novels often take place in a short period of time, probing the moral complexities raised during that duration. The style of his mature fiction is succinct, precise, and unsentimental, even ironic. Cozzens also submitted short fiction and essays to such distinguished periodicals as the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Evening Post, and wrote manuals for the United States Air Force during World War II. Raised in New England and New York, Cozzens spent 25 years in Lambertville with his wife, Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten Cozzens, a successful literary agent
|
|
|
|
